


Streetlights

by BambiLee



Category: NCT (Band), SM Rookies
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gang World, Gen, Nothing explicit, People are going to die, also there are references to sex and prostitution but it's all implicit, i ' m s o r r y, it'll be painful, just pain, there will be blood and heartbreak, this probably isn't light-hearted
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-11-29 16:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 34,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11444745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BambiLee/pseuds/BambiLee
Summary: Lee Sooman controls the underworld of Seoul, overtaking it's dark streets with a collection of strong groups who are prepared to do whatever it takes to please him. NCT is his newest creation, a gang who can be constantly threatened with an eternally changing cast of members - if they fail him, he will not hesitate to kill them and replace them with someone he considers to be more loyal. If Sooman tells you to steal, or fight, or kill, there is no other choice. When Sooman's gang empire is threatened, it's NCT who are fighting as his front line.





	1. Chapter 1

It began with Taeyong.

He did not seem like a criminal mastermind when he was sat, curled up, in an old armchair so faded that the original pattern was no longer visible. He sat on his hands to prevent pulling on his bitten nails with his teeth, face hidden by shadows in a dim flat almost void of furniture. The only evidence that anyone lived there was the scattered trail of belongings littered across the floor with no sense of order. Mark sat among the mess, his face illuminated by a dim laptop screen.

“I can see them,” he announced, his voice echoing around the room and finally causing Taeyong to stir, to sit up straight and fully pay attention. “It was just a standard security camera. It’s almost their own fault, really. They need tighter security.”

“And you know you won’t be found out?” asked Taeyong. He did not like to consider himself nervous or overbearing; he preferred the term ‘thorough’, wanting every little thing to be done perfectly.

“It's never happened before,” reassured Mark. “And you told me you wanted an entire visual on the bank. I can’t get that without some risk, hyung.”

Mark was right – they had used this plan before, and Taeyong had learnt how much faith he had to put into the younger member.

"Okay," murmured Taeyong. His hands finally crept to his mouth, blood beginning to pool in droplets where he tore on dry skin. "Keep an eye on them."

 

Sicheng had sat in a bar, smiling coyly at the man who had taken the bar stool next to him without trying to seem too desperate. Sicheng had done research, had watched the man from across the flashing lights of the night club for most of the evening before catching his eye and taking a seat with an intentional empty space beside him. Every move was calculated, from the way that his delicate fingers slid down the stem of his drink glass to the way that he licked the liquid from his lips after every sip.

“Can I buy you a drink?” Sicheng had asked, almost as soon as he noticed the man glancing back at his smile. He did not turn his head to meet the stranger completely, but instead asked whilst looking at him by looking at the side through strands of hair that had fallen from behind his ear. His request was met with a bright smile.

“Of course, “ answered the man, edging closer to Sicheng in a way that made the younger blush. This job was a lot more fun when the person on the other end was willing to return the advances. “You’re pretty cute, you know.”

“Thanks,” giggled Sicheng – he knew that, that was why he was there instead of any of the others. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

“What can I call you?”

“Ah,” smiled Sicheng, edging closer to the man. “You can call me Winwin."

By the time the man had managed to finish the three drinks that Sicheng had offered to buy him, Sicheng himself had only just finished one. Still, he acted as drunk as the man needed to think he was. He slurred his words together into a mess of badly pronounced Korean syllables, mixing up grammar and laughing lightly at his own mistakes. "Where did you say you worked again?"

The man sounded much worse than Sicheng did. “The bank,” he murmured. “I’m a…a…night guard.”

“You must be so strong and manly to do that job,” complimented Sicheng, going as far to rest his head on the bigger man’s shoulder. The man smiled; Sicheng hated himself, but he punctuated the move by wrapping two hands around the man's upper arm. “Do you do it all on your own?”

“No, I…”

The man hiccupped. Sicheng tried not to laugh.

“I do it…with other people…there’s three of us each night.”

“Still, three isn’t many. You must be really brave!”

“I am, sweetheart.”

The man put his arm around Sicheng’s shoulders. The gun strapped to his thigh became very tempting. Sicheng was not sure whether he would rather use it on the man or himself as an escape, but he took a deep breath and kept thoughts of bullets from filling his mind. “It must be so tiring,” he continued, nuzzling closer to the stranger until he could smell the alcohol on his breath and the tobacco smoke embedding in the fibres of his clothes. It was just one more piece of information. Sicheng had done worse for missions like this before. “Do you work till really, really early in the morning? No one should ever be that tired!”

“You’re adorable,” mumbled the man, pulling Sicheng even close to him. “It’s not…too bad. Only from eight at night, and then we’re gone by five the next morning. We all do it in shifts so no one takes two nights in a row.”

That was what Sicheng needed. He pulled away. “I really need to go now,” he announced, pouting to try and make it seem as if he was genuinely upset. “Maybe I can see you again sometime.”

"Why don't you cancel whatever you're supposed to be doing and come back home with me? It's not safe to be by yourself out there," called the man as Sicheng turned away, but his words were lost under the thumping bass of speakers as the young boy strode confidently towards the door he knew was the back exit. As soon as he was alone in the alley way behind the club, he phoned Taeil.

 

“Three guards,” relayed Taeil, listening to Sicheng instruct him down the phone. Ten had sat on a wall in their alleyway, waiting for Taeil to pass on the information so that he could get started. “They work from eight till five. He doesn’t think it’s anything special either, no training or anything. Just ordinary people with some extra muscle that makes them look more intimidating.”

“Is there anything else I need to know?” asked Ten. He pulled his mask over his face.

“He apparently tried to take Sicheng back to his place,” grinned Taeil. Ten could hear Sicheng complaining down the phone as Taeil took it away from his ear. “He says if you could kill him in revenge, he wouldn't be mad at you."

Ten’s laugh was muffled through the thick fabric of his mask.

“I haven't seen a target that I'd call attractive yet,” continued Taeil, hanging up the phone with Sicheng mid-sentence. “Sicheng deserves some bonus for taking one for a team each night. You need to go. Johnny and Jeno will meet you at the bank. If you need Kun…”

“I won’t need Kun,” reassured Ten, nodding gently towards Taeil and giving him the slightest salute as a goodbye as he turned on the wall and let his feet hit the tarmac on the other side. He took off running, staying away from the beams of distant streetlights and sticking to abandoned roads as much as he could. The bank they were aiming for was on the other side of the town, but Ten knew of the shortcuts that would get him there as quick as he needed to. As he ran, he took his own phone out of his pocket and dialled the number he always had on speed dial; Mark had already tricked it out, making sure that any call could not be traced by anyone.

“Chenle, we might need you tonight.”

 

Chenle sighed, waiting on the roof of a skyscraper that overlooked the building they were supposed to be targeting. He would rather have been down there – he could see those who would be in the action hiding in the shadows – but his job was always from a distance, sniper rifle in his hand.

“Do you think you’ll actually have to shoot anyone tonight?” asked a wide-eyed Jisung, watching the weapon that Chenle held closer than Chenle himself. He sat on the wall behind the older boy, so near the edge of the wall that the slightest lean backwards would have sent him tumbling fifty stories to the concrete below. Jisung disregarded fear.

“Ten told me to be ready,” answered Chenle through gritted teeth. “I’ll shoot if I have to.”

“But do you think you’ll actually have to?”

“Jisung, shut it before I shoot you.”

Jisung went quiet, but only for a second. “Have you shot anyone before, hyung?”

“Do you think Taeyong-hyung would let me be here if I stopped every time I had to take a shot?” retorted Chenle. He pulled his rifle closer to his side.  “Of course I have.”

“Do you think Taeyong-hyung will let me do it?”

“You’re a baby.”

“I’m barely younger than you!"

“Shut it."

This time, Jisung listened.

“I need you to be completely silent,” continued Chenle, turning from the small boy back to the edge of the roof where they waited. He rested the barrel of his gun on the thin metal barricade. “I need to listen. I will shoot you if you say another word because I’m not having someone I am babysitting ruin this entire plan.”

 

“Chenle is in position,” explained Ten, as soon as he reached the alleyway where the rest of the team were waiting for him. “If anyone comes after us, he’ll take them down. Three guards. It’s not a great system. Mark is already into the CCTV.”

Johnny nodded, his height not hidden by the shadows. He looked strong, as if he could break someone just by grabbing hold of his wrist, but he was only violent when he needed to be. In real life, he was one of the softest people Ten had ever met. “Jeno is keeping an eye out from a roof over the other side,” he explained, watching as Ten pulled a gun from his pocket. “We’ve got Renjun to get into the safe, and Donghyuck just in case that’s not enough.”

“Oh great, I’ll put Kun on standby if we’re using Donghyuck,” murmured Ten, earning himself a sharp stab in the ribs from the small boy. “Renjun, can you pick the lock on the door?”

“I can try,” answered Renjun, his hair only just peeking out from his dark hood. "But they might have a better lock than we think if they're not even trying with their security."

He knelt by the door, head pressed against the glass as he messed with the lock on the side door into the staff entrance of the bank. For a moment, that was the only noise before Renjun sighed.

“Is it not working?” asked Johnny, bending down to the same height as the small boy. “It's flimsy, we don't even need Donghyuck. Want us to kick it down?”

“People will hear us if you do that,” countered Renjun. He still tried, even though the lock did not respond to his orders.

“People are going to hear us anyway, it's okay,” reassured Johnny. “We move fast, got it? On the count of three.”

Johnny shattered the glass with a single kick by the end of his countdown. He did not need to speak to give an order, pushing forward with the three others behind him moving into the bank where alarms had begun to blare and people were beginning to take interest. “Okay,” murmured Ten, keeping his back against a wall, his mask pulled over his face and his eyes fixed on a security camera which had instantly focused on them. “Mark showed you the blueprints, yeah? He’s got control over the security system. There’s two ways to the safe. I’ll take Renjun. Johnny, take Donghyuck. Meet you there in, ten minutes? If you see anyone, take no chances.”

“I’ll message Jaemin  if we’re going to need someone to get the bloodstains off the walls,” smiled Johnny, pulling his own mask up to hide the grin. Donghyuck and Renjun copied his movement.

“Jaemin’s already on his way,” reassured Ten, taking the joke in all seriousness. “Once Taeil told me that there were guards, it was obvious there were going to be casualties. Anyway, Chenle’s on guard in case someone gets to us before we're ready. When do we ever get out without a kill when he’s aiming at whoever goes after us?”

Johnny smirked; Ten could see it in the small crinkle in his eyes. Without another word, the two groups split and moved through the corridors of the bank to the vault at the back. Johnny and Donghyuck were used to working together, able to move in silence whilst still knowing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. Johnny led the way, his larger frame intimidating as he reaffirmed his grip on the pistol which he kept with him at all times.

After the third corner, he stopped and held back with a finger over his lips. Donghyuck stayed beside him, pushing himself against a wall. “There’s a guard,” whispered Johnny, pressing his finger down slightly on the trigger of his weapon. “I don’t think he saw us.”

“Are you going to shoot him?”

“Do you think it’ll be better if we get caught?”

Donghyuck did not have an answer to that. Johnny took his gun and fired a bullet through the head of the guard. He hoped it was painless.

 

Jeno watched alone, the wind causing him to shiver as he stood on the roof of the building opposite the bank. He had seen them enter the bank, could hear the alarms drifting on the evening breeze. It would only be a few minutes before someone came to find them, and it was his job to make the call as a warning as soon as he saw the flashing lights of police in the distance.

He kept his phone in his hands, the warmth of the battery almost biting through the chill of the evening weather. He had both Ten and Johnny on speed dial; he hoped they were together, but he knew it was better to call Ten if they needed to get out of there fast. There was also Chenle who would have been sitting a few floors below him, leaning beside a window with his sniper rifle ready. Jeno would have to call him as well, just in case anyone got to close to the bank before Jaehyun could get them away.

He was not the sort of person who liked being alone. He spent far too many of his nights on top of cold buildings, looking over the city with no one except himself. He could not do anything to distract himself; he needed his full attention focused on the city. He hated it, but he was always too scared to argue.

The sound of distant police sirens were just another addition to the city soundscape. They did not scare Jeno like they used to. He was used to how their blue and red lights would reflect off the mirror maze of windows as the cars tore through the traffic of the city. They were his warning sign. He pressed Ten’s number on speed dial.

It was exactly three rings until Ten picked up, the sound of the bank alarm in the background. “Police are on their way,” announced Jeno, forgoing a usual ‘hello’. “You probably have two or three minutes. I’ll tell Chenle. Are you done?”

“Nowhere near,” replied Ten, bitterly. “If we don’t have something, it’ll be worse than getting caught. Get Jaehyun to get here, we’ll need to get out of here fast.”

“Be careful,” warned Jeno, but Ten had already hung up. Jeno sighed, and phoned the second number. “Chenle, they’re on their way. Ten needs you to take them all out if you can, I think they need as much time as possible.”

“Won’t it be suspicious if I take out everyone?” retorted Chenle. Jeno could hear him readying his sniper.

“It’ll be suspicious enough if you just kill one of them,” argued Jeno. “We’ve got alarms on in the bank and police on their way, I think we’re past the point of being suspicious. Just shoot anyone who gets near them, Ten needs more time.”

 

Jaehyun had been driving around the city for almost too long, trapped in the Seoul city traffic whilst waiting for the call to come through his hands-free device. He had already heard the news on the radio; whoever it was who had taken the bank, the heist was in full swing already. He answered as soon as the phone began ringing with a quick, curt “talk to me”.

“You need to be there fast,” ordered Jeno, and Jaehyun immediately changed direction to speed through the traffic to their target of the night.

“I’m always fast,” he reassured, trying to focus on the road more than his conversation. “You know I’m not told in advance in case I get caught. Who am I picking up?”

“Ten, Johnny, Renjun, Donghyuck,” answered Jeno. “Chenle is taking out police as we speak, you need to be fast. Ten asked for extra time and I think we’re already giving them time that they don’t have. You need to be there as soon as you can and you need to get out of there.”

“On my way. You need to get out of there too. Get back to the safe house, Taeyong and Mark will know what’s happening, it’s all over the news.”

“Of course it is, they aren’t exactly being subtle this evening.”

Jeno hung up as Jaehyun chuckled to himself, making the final turn into the alleyway where he kept the car running to make a quick getaway. He could hear the alarm blaring through his closed windows, even over his roaring engine. Jaehyun had not even counted a minute before the four from the bank were kicking back through the glass in the door, stumbling over the wreckage to clamber into the car and not even being able to instruct Jaehyun to drive before Jaehyun had floored the acceleration and pulled onto the road. He drove as fast as he dared to not arose suspicious, focusing on distance rather than speed.

“You don’t have anything with you,” he commented through gritted teeth. “You failed?”

“We didn’t have enough time,” argued Ten, with the same bitter tone. “We can’t do anything when the police know we’re there before we’re even out of the bank’s reception area.”

“Any casualties?”

“One dead, but I don’t think Jaemin exactly has time to clear up,” said Johnny. “The police are already in there. An officer saw Ten’s face.”

“My mask slipped down!” protested Ten, panicked. “I didn’t realise and it was just so fast and I…I…”

“Calm down,” murmured Jaehyun, taking a hand off his steering wheel to place it comfortingly on Ten’s leg as he sunk into the seat of the car. “You’re not the first person who’s been seen.”

“We didn’t get anything and I got seen by an officer,” muttered Ten, biting down on his lip so hard that the metallic taste of blood filled his mouth. “Sooman is going to kill me.”

“Not if Yuta kills the officer first. That’s why we have him. I’ll phone ahead and let him now. Can you remember what the officer looked like?”

Ten nodded.

“Good. I’ll call, you give the description.”

 

“It wasn’t me, I swear!” cried Jaemin, his hands handcuffed behind his back as the flashes of red and blue lights illuminated his face. “I’m just a kid, you can’t do this.”

“You were found at the scene of a serious bank robbery,” answered the police officer who was holding him still whilst another patted him down to check for concealed weapons. Jaemin was glad he had left his gun with Taeyong. “A bank has been broken into, one guard and two police officers have been killed and you were found on the pavement beside it. You have the right to remain silent, anything you do say can and will be held against you. I’m required to ask how old you are.”

Jaemin did not answer.

“You have to right to stay silent, but if you answer this now then it will be a lot easier when we get to the station.”

“Sixteen.”

“You’re old enough to be considered responsible for your actions.”

“I can’t be considered responsible for something I didn’t do.”

“For now, we’re considering you as a suspect. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be prosecuted. Do you have a parent or guardian we can contact?”

Jaemin nodded; he had practiced this exact situation, just in case. If anyone asked, he was not in contact with his father, his mother worked a night shift and the only person who could come and collect him from the police station was his older brother. Doyoung was going to be thrilled to be playing that role.

“We’ll contact them as soon as we get to the station. What’s your name?”

This question was more complicated. Unlike some of the other members, he did not have a second identity that he could give away whenever he was asked. His name was the only one he had, and there was nothing better. “Jaemin.”

“Okay, Jaemin. You don’t need to be scared. Just climb into the back seat of this police car for me, and we’ll take you down to the station for questioning.”

 

Yuta spotted the man matching Ten’s description almost as soon as he wandered near to the crime scene. He was wearing a police uniform, but he leant up against a building a few blocks away from the bank and held a cigarette in his trembling hand. The sound of sirens drifted by on the wind.

“Shit, are you okay?” called Yuta, crossing over the road. He faked concern, looking at the grey complexion of the officer as he held the cigarette to his man. “You look as if you’ve seen something bad.”

“Ah, just a rough night,” answered the officer, trying to force a smile.

“I can hear the sirens,” tried Yuta. “Bank robbery, right? Shit, did…did someone die?”

The officer hesitated, but then nodded. “They must have had a sniper,” he explained, not knowing if he was supposed to spread the information but just grateful that someone was willing to listen. “Two other officers, right in front of me. They caught some kid but…I needed some time out.”

“Fuck…”

Yuta’s voice trailed off. He tried to look concerned, but his head was buzzing. He never liked the sound of police catching someone when it had been his own members who had been there. “Do you want anything?” he added, placing an arm around the officer’s shoulders. “Another cigarette? Strong drink? There’s a convenience store nearby, I can…”

Yuta interrupted himself, slipping his dagger out from his sleeve and securing it in his grip before driving the blade through the officer’s neck. Blood began to drip down Yuta’s hands; he did not like the feel of it, retrieving his blade and wiping it off on the officer’s shirt before letting the body drop to the ground. Yuta trod on the cigarette to extinguish it.

He hated his job sometimes.

“Hey!”

The shout was a panicked one. Yuta glanced down the street to see two other officers, guns already out and aiming at him. Yuta swore under his breath, turning and tearing along the pavement as fast as he could. The only sound he could hear was his own beating heart and pounding footsteps but then – a shot.

The searing pain in his abdomen hit him before the realisation that he had been shot. He stumbled, grabbing hold of a brick wall as he tried to turn into an alleyway that would offer him some shelter. He gritted his teeth, feeling his own blood run across his fingers as he desperately held on to his stomach. He could not run anymore. He needed someone.

Kun.

The alleyway lead onto the back entrance to an abandoned convenience store, one which had been for sale and that had already been ransacked bare. The door opened with the slightest touch, allowing Yuta to fall in and stain the tiles beneath with his own crimson blood as the police who had seen him ran past, thinking he had continued further down the road.

Yuta waited, as long as he could bare. He counted seconds with his heart beat, but he was certain that the familiar sound was beginning to slow and when he could stand it no more, he fumbled for the phone in his pocket and held it to his ear after clumsily choosing the right number.

“Kun,” he gasped as soon as he heard the other end pick up, speaking far more painful than he had anticipated.

“Shit, what have you done now?”

Kun’s voice was full of concern, just as it always was. He was the perfect medic, but his habit of assuming the worst had always made Yuta laugh. He did not smile now. “I got shot,” he explained through pained breaths. “I…I don’t think they saw me but…there’s blood, Kun, and I don’t know if it belongs to me or the guy I killed.”

“Where are you?”

“Some…some abandoned shop, I don’t know what road. Kun, please, it…it hurts so much.”

“I’ll get Mark to trace the phone call. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

 

“You can’t hold my brother overnight,” explained Doyoung, almost banging his fist down on the reception desk in exasperation. He could see Jaemin sitting in an office, answering questions with monosyllabic answers whilst keeping a slight eye on Doyoung from a distance. “He did not do anything wrong. He’s a sixteen year old kid. I just sent him out to get snacks from a convenience store, okay?”

“Why would you send a sixteen year old out that late at night anyway?” countered the receptionist; Doyoung did not like her, or her fake, plastic smile. “I can’t hand over Jaemin until you can prove you are his legal guardian and when Jaemin has finished being questioned.”

“What are you doing holding him here when it’s three in the morning?” complained Doyoung in a counter attack. “The poor kid has school in the morning, he’s never going to get there if you keep talking to him about something he didn’t do.”

“Are you his legal guardian?”

“No, I told you this. I’m his older brother. I’ve overage, and I’m in charge of him. What else do you need?”

“You’re not his legal guardian. If he is accused, then only a legal guardian can collect him and he will be unable to leave his house until the court hearing. Where is his mother?”

Doyoung sighed. He felt as if he had explained the story here more times than he had rehearsed it beforehand. “His mother is working the night shift at a factory nearby,” he answered, trying not to roll his eyes. “If you think that sounds like a shitty job then it is, and they will probably fire her if she has to leave early to come collect a son who is absolutely innocent. We haven’t seen our father in years, he can’t come either. I am the only one who is able to collect Jaemin and I just want to take him home.”

“If he is found to be a viable suspect through questioning, it has to be his mother…”

“And what if he’s innocent?”

Doyoung almost smiled at the defeated look on the receptionist’s face when he interrupted her. “You can’t keep him here if he’s innocent,” he continued, trying not to look as triumphant as he was feeling. “Check the security cameras, anything. Jaemin wouldn’t hurt a fly. Anyway, he doesn’t even have a weapon on him. How is a kid his size going to break into a bank and shoot a fully trained guard if he doesn’t even have a gun?”

The receptionist bit her lip. “The security footage was reviewed,” she explained, after a moment of hesitation. “The suspects were wearing masks, but none fitted Jaemin’s description and I doubt he will be found guilty after the questioning. We just have to meet formalities. Jaemin will probably be done in a few minutes and then you can take him home.”

On the walk from the police station to the safe house, Jaemin seemed more unsettled than when he had been interviewed by police. “Is Sooman going to kill me?” he asked softly, barely audible of the lullaby of Seoul city. “I mean, I got arrested and I had to give away my real name and…”

“Fuck no,” interrupted Doyoung in the most reassuring tone he could manage. “You’re the only one who actually did what you were told tonight. It’s not your fault that no one told you the heist was a failure, you just turned up like Ten had said you needed to and you ended up thrown into the mess everyone else had left behind. You didn’t tell them anything, did you?”

“No! I wouldn’t do that.”

“See, you actually did well. Meanwhile Ten got himself seen, the heist team didn’t actually take anything and Yuta is apparently bleeding to death on an abandoned shop floor somewhere. Somehow, you getting arrested is the least of our problems.”

Jaemin bit his lip. “Sooman is going to be pissed, isn’t he?”

“That’s an understatement.”

 

Kun spotted Yuta as soon as he managed to find his way into the shop, the Japanese boy propped up against an empty shelf with blood pooling around him. It seeped through Kun’s jeans as he knelt down to get a closer look. “How the fuck did you get shot?” he murmured, having to peel Yuta’s jacket and t-shirt away from the wound in his stomach.

“I don’t fucking know,” murmured Yuta, his voice weak. He winced every time Kun moved him. “It’s not like I went out planning to be shot.”

The wound was deeper than Kun had hoped, and the blood loss was growing significant. He did not have enough time to do a blood transfusion; hopefully, that would not be an issue. “It missed all your vital organs,” he explained, shrugging his bag from his back and rooting through it to find a knife and a cigarette lighter. He held the blade in the flame, sterilising every inch in the heat. By now, Kun was used to working with the very basic of resources. “You’re probably not going to die.”

“I don’t like the fact you used the word ‘probably’.”

“There’s always blood poisoning,” shrugged Kun, positioning the knife against the wound. “This is going to hurt like shit, okay? Try not to move.”

Placing a hand across Yuta’s mouth to muffle his screams, Kun dug the blade into the gunshot wound in Yuta’s side and tried to find the remnants of the bullet as fast as he could. Yuta’s shouts of pain were heart breaking, his complexion flooding white. Kun hated this part of the job, but if it meant that Yuta lived even for a few short minutes more, then it was worth it.

He managed to cut the bullet out, taking a bandage and ripping open the packet before beginning to wrap it around Yuta’s stomach. The Japanese boy panted heavily, colour refusing to return to his cheeks. “I fucking hate you sometimes, Kun,” he murmured, voice hoarse from screaming.

“I’ll let you die next time,” retorted Kun, keeping calm as he continued tightening the bandage as fast as he could.

“I’m still probably going to die, right?”

“Blood poisoning.”

“I wonder which will get me first, blood poisoning or Sooman?”

Yuta laughed at himself, and Kun could not help but raise an eyebrow. “What’s this?” he asked. “Gallows humour already? Come on Yuta, you’re stronger than one small gunshot wound. You’ll probably be stabbing people in the neck again before the week is out. Jaehyun is waiting outside. We really need to get you into the car and back to the safe house before anyone clocks that it’s the same car from the bank and…”

Kun was interrupted by the ringing of his phone. He sighed, taking Yuta’s hand and instructing him to keep pressure on the wound over the bandage before taking the phone from his jacket pocket and holding it to his ear. Taeyong spoke as soon as he answered.

“Is Yuta going to live?”

Kun bit his lip. “How specific do you need me to be?”

“Just answer the question. Is Yuta going to live, and can you get him back to the safe house?”

“Yes, if you give me time.”

“Sooman says if he’s going to die, leave him there. If not, bring him back now.”

Kun felt his heartbeat grow irregular at the sound of the familiar name. “Sooman?” he mumbled, hearing Yuta’s breath catch in his throat as he overheard. “He’s there with you? Now?”

“Yes. He says get here quick, with or without Yuta depending on his injury.”

“We’re fucked, aren’t we?”


	2. Chapter 2

Yuta leant his full weight on Kun as they stumbled from the lift, trying to edge himself forward with the help of the medic and the smooth wall that he grasped at with bloodied hands. Jaehyun had gone ahead, at Kun’s instruction, to explain the situation to the man that was waiting for him. “Not much further,” murmured Kun, readjusting his arm under the shoulders of the older boy.

“Sooman is going to be so pissed off,” answered Yuta, but he forced himself forward and almost fell against the front door to their safe house; it was only a small apartment, two rooms with a kitchenette hiding in a corner, and a tiny bathroom tucked away in a corner that was probably best if left avoided. It was cramped, dirty, dark, but it was home to seventeen boys who always felt safe within its thin walls – it was enough.

Still supporting Yuta, Kun knocked on the door as loud as he could. As leader, Taeyong was the only one who was allowed to have a key to their front door and the responsibility of who was allowed to enter fell onto his shoulders. As it opened, they were not greeted with the familiar face of a leader they trusted with dishevelled lilac hair that he never found time to tame. Instead, an imposing figure in a black suit that matched his short haircut had been waiting for them.

He did not speak; when he moved aside, Kun helped Yuta into the safe house and supported him as he fell to his knees on the floor. Yuta leant against the whitewashed walls, his complexion changing from just white to grey with the exhaustion it had taken to get him home. Lee Sooman watched him, taking in the way his frame collapsed and hunched forward with his head between his knees. Kun remained standing.

“Is he going to live?” asked Sooman, switching the fire of his gaze to the medic who stood beside the patient. He did not match the apartment, his impeccable suit almost becoming tainted by the dirt, and blood, and seventeen wide-eyed, terrified boys who either sat or stood around him.

“I…I don’t know,” stuttered Kun, twisting his hands as he tried to distract himself by focusing on Yuta.

“You know I don’t like not having information, Kun.”

“If I could tell you, sir, I would. I don’t know.”

“I’m going to be fine,” added Yuta, but his pained breathing and weak voice were not convincing. Sooman looked at him, a glare that told Yuta he should look down, stay quiet, be respectful and obedient. Yuta did not like any of those things but in that situation, at that moment, he did not have the strength to fight back.

“If we assume you die,” continued Sooman, tearing his glare away to look around the other sixteen boys who waited to hear what we had to say. Yuta did not complain; he hated it, but he stayed silent. “That is not an issue. There are replacements, always replacements. I am still disappointed. What kind of a night is this? Yuta is shot, Ten was seen, Jaemin was arrested, and do you have anything to show for it?”

Together, the sixteen listening boys looked away from the man who controlled them. They looked everywhere they could: the floor, the window, the blank walls stained with dirt. “Taeyong,” continued Sooman, directing his words at the slim boy who had taken the role of the leader. Taeyong was slow in his movement, but he pushed himself up from the bare floorboards, forcing himself to meet the eye of the man commanding his attention. “Why don’t you tell us what you have to show for tonight?”

Taeyong hesitated, trying to form words but finding only silence and a pain in his throat. He closed his mouth, biting down on his lip until Sooman cocked his head, waiting for an answer. “We didn’t get anything,” he answered, looking down at the floor.

“Exactly,” replied Sooman. “Nothing. Not a single thing to show for tonight. Do you think I’m happy, Taeyong?”

“No.”

“You can sit down.”

Taeyong followed the instruction, leaning against the wall and choosing not to look at the man who had given him the instruction. “You’ve not been successful for quite some time now,” continued Sooman, taking his attention away from the leader and focusing on each boy alone as he spoke. They all shrunk from his gaze. “If you’re not going to be useful, I don’t want you here anymore. And what happens to those I don’t want?”

This did not need an answer; Sooman smirked, knowing that his words hung in the air with a threat above them.

“This is a family, all of you. Every group, every single person I have under me to control this city, we are family. It is not possible to just leave, you have to be – how do I put this, cut off? I’m sure you know this. There have been several members of this group who have caused me trouble, just like with all others. This is not new information to you.”

For those who had been in the group long enough to understand what they were being told, there was a collective intake of breath as they were reminded. There had not been an issue for some time. They had not lost a member in a few months. It was not an experience they wanted to relive. You did not just ‘leave’ the Sooman family – you were shot through the head, thrown into a river, dragged into a dark alleyway and beaten until your body had no choice but to give in. You disappeared.

“The beauty of this faction, of NCT,” sighed Sooman. “Is that I chose not to restrict myself. I learnt from the others. I learnt that when something goes wrong, the group just grows smaller and smaller until I am forced to create a new faction just to keep my influence growing. With you, I don’t have that. I can add at my will, and I can take away.”

Yuta drew his knees up to his chest when Sooman looked directly at him. “Don’t make me do that, Yuta,” he commented, and Yuta could feel his gaze burning through him as he hid by looking at the floor. “I’ve done it before. If you don’t start proving that you’re useful to me, I won’t hesitate to do it again. This goes for Ten, as well. You were all responsible for the failure tonight, but some of you are proving that you are more troublesome than others.”

Jisung edged closer to Chenle, a chill running through him at the harsh words even though they were not aimed in his direction. Despite his cold demeanour throughout the mission, Chenle was not heartless; he placed an arm around the maknae, letting Jisung rest a trembling head on his shoulder. “You’re clearly not doing well on your own,” continued Sooman, turning his attention back to Taeyong. “Yuta is going to be out of action for a while anyway, whether he lives or dies, and I don’t particularly trust Ten to be leaving this house until I am certain he is committed to my instructions, and that includes staying anonymous. Both of them are confined to this house until further notice and if either of them leave, I will know. Do you understand, Taeyong?”

Taeyong nodded.

“You will be in as much trouble as they are if these instructions are disobeyed, so be prepared to face the consequences. As to how you’ll continue working, I’ve had my eye on two replacements for this team for quite a while. It makes sense to introduce them now.”

There was a murmur; Sooman smirked at the sound of uncertainty. “We…we can’t handle another two,” argued Taeyong, his voice soft. As leader, the responsibility fell to him. “There’s already sixteen of us, how do we…”

“If you keep arguing with me, there won’t be sixteen of you anymore,” interrupted Sooman. Taeyong fell silent. “You can handle two more because I say you can handle two more and clearly, you need them. We've had our eyes on them for a while. One attends a school close by. Doyoung, if you collect him when he is done with his classes and bring him here, Mark can ensure that he’s no longer on the grid and then he’s all ours. He goes by the name Jungwoo. The other, Yukhei, he might be more difficult. He’s been trying to run ever since he found out what he’s gotten himself into. Someone is sheltering him, possibly another family. He might prove to be an issue, and I can’t say he’ll be a member for long, so I wouldn’t get too attached. We’re going to need some more information before we find him.”

Sicheng sighed audibly, his small frame sliding further down the wall that offered him a backrest. Sooman chose to ignore it. “That will be all,” he announced, turning towards the door and opening it with a strong pull. “You know that I get angry when I have to lose any of you. Don’t make it come to that.”

He left, leaving a collective moment of relief in the room behind him as the door fell shut. There was a sound as it was locked from the outside; sometimes, Sooman did that. It was a sign that he was worried they would be in danger. After Ten’s face had been seen and Jaemin had been arrested, it was a precaution that no one in the room found worrying. “Right,” began Taeyong, pulling himself to his feet. He ran a hand through his hair. “You heard what he said. I don’t want to lose anyone else and if you get into trouble, I get into trouble. Yuta, Ten, please don’t either of you leave until you’re told you can. Babies, you need to sleep.”

“That’s not fair,” murmured Jisung, Chenle pulling away to let his head fall from his shoulder.

“Life isn’t fair,” countered Taeyong. “I don’t care how fucked up we are, I’m meant to be taking care of you and I’m going to do it properly because no one else will. Mark, you too. If we find Jungwoo tomorrow, you’re going to be busy. I don’t want you to be tired and make mistakes, any of you. We’ll be quiet and – where are you going?”

Yuta had pulled himself from the floor, trying to make it across the room with one arm propping himself up on the wall and the other holding against his wound. “The bathroom,” he replied, dryly. “Do I need permission and supervision to go there too or am I good?”

Johnny held a hand out to steady him. “Will you be okay?” he asked, gesturing towards the place on his stomach covered heavily in bandages behind his blood-stained hoodie. “I mean, you’ve been shot and…”

“If he can move by himself, there’s no issue,” explained Kun. “Go on, Yuta.”

With a slight nod, Yuta edged his way across the room and into the only tiny bathroom that the apartment had. It was dark, with no windows, no working light. The water that ran from the shower was cold, but it was as clean as Taeyong could get it when it was being used by seventeen boys all at once. It was the only place in the safe house that offered privacy.

As soon as Yuta had locked the door behind him, he dropped to his knees and scraped along the floor for a specific spot, just underneath the sink. There was a loose bare floorboard, one he could pull up with enough strength and expose the space underneath that only he knew about. He ran his hand through the dust, finding the item he was looking for and switching it on as he retrieved it.

A phone.

It was one of their old phones, tricked out by Mark to be safe to be used, that had been left after the death of one of their former members. Yuta was not supposed to have it, but he did and he hid it, the light of the screen illuminating the locked bathroom as he waited for it to load. Once it did, he used trembling hands to open new message and set the recipient as the only contact in the whole system – ‘Naruto’.

_3:28am – House arrest. I can’t see you._

Yuta had become used to waiting for a reply, and the person on the receiving end of his messages did as well. In their best conversations, they replied to each other once a day when Yuta could sneak off, unnoticed, and that was enough just because it was something. This time, the reply came almost immediately.

_3:29am – What did you do this time?_

_3:29am – Why are you still awake?_

_3:29am – Thinking of you <3_

_3:30am – I hate you_

_3:30am – Love you too, baby_

Yuta sighed, moving from kneeling to sitting on the hard wood floor with his legs crossed. There was still a sharp, stabbing pain in his stomach but he put up with it to talk whilst he had the opportunity.

_3:32am – I want to see you_

_3:33am – Then why did you get put under house arrest?_

It would be better if he stayed silent, if he did not reveal the real reason. If he was to tell everything that had happened, it would only worry him. Yuta remained quiet, until the recipient of his messages replied again.

_3:35am – Don’t sneak out. You’ll get TY into trouble_

_3:35am – I’m not going to sneak out. I won’t be locked up for long._

_3:36am – What did you do????_

Yuta hesitated.

_3:38am – Yuyu, if you don’t tell me then I’m going to have to come and find out_

_3:38am – Don’t you dare_

_3:38am – Then you have to tell me. I didn’t stay awake this late for you to stay quiet_

A knock came at the bathroom down, making Yuta jump and instinctively hide the phone underneath his jacket. “You okay in there, Yuta?” asked Kun, his voice thick through the door.

“Yeah,” answered Yuta, trying not to sound urgent. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just…moving hurts, yeah?”

“If you need help, I’ll….I’ll send Taeil.”

“I’m okay, honestly. Just give me a minute.”

Yuta pulled out the phone again, unlocking the screen again and typing again.

_3:41am – I got shot please don’t worry it’s not serious kun says I’m probably not going to die_

_3:41am – ‘probably’_

_3:41am – it’ll be okay I promise I have to go they’re getting suspicious_

_3:41am – Don’t get caught, don’t get shot, don’t get hurt, okay Yuyu? I want to see you_

_3:42am – I won’t. I want to see you too._

Yuta turned the phone off before he could see the final message – ‘ _I love you so much’ –_ appear on the dim screen.

 

Doyoung had found that he had grown to hate the sunlight. He was not allowed out in it very often – when you joined Sooman, it became important that you were hidden by darkness. Even when he had permission to be there at four in the afternoon, he found himself standing in the shadow of a wall as he stood, waiting, outside of the school gates for the boy he had been told to look for.

He had been sent a picture to his phone, a grainy image that had been stolen from the security camera of a nearby convenience store. Doyoung did not know how he was supposed to feel about waiting outside a school, a picture that the boy did not know he had as his only recognition, to take a boy to a life that was much darker than a normal one. Somehow, Doyoung felt used to it. He had done it with Mark, Jaemin, Jisung, Donghyuck – now, it was time for Jungwoo.

As a school bell echoed across the city on a distant wind, the school gates opened and became overrun by an ocean of navy uniforms. Doyoung stayed far enough away to not arouse suspicion for the wrong reasons, scanning the crowd for any face that resembled the one he had to been told to look for it. When he saw one, a young boy walking alongside two friends with his backpack slung over one shoulder, Doyoung called out.

“Jungwoo-ah!”

The boy jumped, turning towards the stranger who had called his name. Doyoung watched with a smirk on his face for him to come closer. Jungwoo murmured for his friends to go on without him, two boys who seemed happy enough to shrug their shoulders and leave Jungwoo wandering back towards the school gates, towards a man who waited in the shadows with the faintest silhouette of a smirk on his face as the younger boy readjusted his backpack to hang more comfortably.

“What did you want?” asked Jungwoo, clearly attempting to sound a lot more menacing than he was able to. It made Doyoung laugh, the smirk finally growing into a sound like a wind chime in a light breeze as he placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Come on, we’ve got places to be.”

Jungwoo pulled away, something Doyoung had half been expecting. He showed his disappointed through the smallest sigh, a shrug, as Jungwoo looked him up and down with an expression that was half intrigued, half almost terrified of the man he had not seen before. “I don’t even know you,” he protested, eventually; panic was creeping into his voice. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Sure,” humoured Doyoung. “You're in trouble. If you don't come with me, Sooman will come get you later and that will be less pretty.”

Jungwoo froze; Doyoung was right in assuming he would remember the name. He almost felt guilty at the sight of the defiance falling from the boy’s face, fear flashing behind his chocolate eyes as his gaze fell to the floor. “Will you come with me now?” asked Doyoung, when he felt their silence grow uncomfortable in the accompaniment of distant, chattering school children.

“I thought he’d forgotten about me,” murmured Jungwoo, before glancing at Doyoung with something that could only be described as desperation. “Can’t you tell him you couldn’t find me? That I ran away or something?”

“If I don’t take you back, he’ll kill me. I’m not happy about this arrangement either. Are you coming or do I have to drag you?”

Jungwoo hesitated. Doyoung hated this part of his job; it never got easier. “Come on,” he continued, trying to muster a reassuring tone that he was not sure was convincing. “I’m not going to hurt you, no one back at the house is going to hurt you, no one in the group or the family is going to hurt you at all. We like people like you. If you’re worried about Sooman, he won’t be back around for a few days and by then, we’ll have been able to teach you how not to get yourself dragged into an alleyway and killed.”

Doyoung tilted his head at the way Jungwoo’s body stiffened, the slight movement as he finally pulled his backpack over both of his shoulders and how he ran a hand through his hair without even thinking about it. “How old are you?” asked Doyoung, reaching out to take his shoulder again. This time, Jungwoo did not pull away.

“Nineteen,” he answered, quiet. He seemed younger, but Doyoung did not want to argue.

“How did you get mixed up with Sooman already?”

“I didn’t, I – my dad, I mean. Something went wrong...”

“It's okay,” murmured Doyoung. “You're a replacement for him, got it. We have a few boys like that. Sooman likes keeping up numbers.”

When Doyoung started walking, Jungwoo followed beside him without a question. He understood enough, just the right amount to know that if he did not go with the strange man that had waited for him outside of his school gates, the repercussions would be far more dangerous. “Once…once I’m there,” he began in his soft voice, staying as far away from Doyoung on the pavement as he could without walking in the road. “Once I’ve agreed to this, I can’t go back, can I? I can’t go home or, or go to school, right?”

“Right,” confirmed Doyoung. He heard Jungwoo sigh, even over the sound of distant traffic of the city. “It’s still got to be better than taking your exams, right?”

Jungwoo did not laugh. “I don’t even get to say goodbye?”

“Do you even have anyone to say goodbye to?” asked Doyoung, his tone harsh enough to put a pout on Jungwoo’s lips. He was right; Jungwoo’s parents had been missing ever since his father had attempted to desert his position under Lee Sooman, but he had a foster family, friends, people he would miss. “Listen, we all miss people, okay? I haven’t seen my older brother since Sooman’s men cornered me in the lift at my old apartment and said I didn’t have a choice. If you say goodbye or contact them or anything, they are immediately in danger. You know better than anyone that Sooman will go for family if he can’t take you. If you just let yourself get cut off, it’s better. By tomorrow, it will be out that you’re dead. You were kidnapped or murdered or threw yourself off a building because you just couldn’t take it anymore. Your family will be sad, yes, but it will fade. They’ll forget you eventually. But if you take them into this life with you, that danger is never gone. You don’t want that for them, do you?”

Jungwoo did not answer. Doyoung did not need him to.

 

“Open up,” demanded Doyoung, knocking heavily on the door that separated their safe house from the dangers of the outside world. Jungwoo stood beside him, trembling beneath the blazer of his school uniform. “We’ve got fresh meat and he looks terrified so, you know, I’d rather have the rest of you there in case he chooses to fight back.”

“I’m not going to fight back,” reassured Jungwoo, and Doyoung was convinced from just his statement. Jungwoo did not seem the fighting type; he did not seem the type that Sooman would have had his eye on at all. Sooman’s family was offered powered by desperation, with Sooman himself preying on those who had no other options, nothing to lose in joining him. Jungwoo seemed almost normal.

He had listened when Doyoung talked to him on the walk to the safe house, something that Doyoung was appreciative of as the other boys that he spent his life around had learnt to grow tired of his voice. Jungwoo had seem interested in the other boys in particular, asking occasional questions about ages, names, reasons why they were locked inside an agreement with a mad man rather than living their own, normal lives. Doyoung had not been able to tell him everything – he did not know the life story of all seventeen boys in the family that they were supposed to refer to as NCT – but Jungwoo was grateful for anything that he could learn.

Taeyong opened the door once that he was convinced that it was Doyoung waiting for him on the other side, his expression refusing to change when he noticed the smaller boy, uniform hanging from his slim frame, almost hiding behind the man he had become closer to. It was not the first time that Doyoung had come back with a school child in tow, someone new to feed and teach until they became useful. Taeyong was not sure whether he hated having to look after them, or that they were in a position where they needed looking after.

“He looks almost normal,” commented Taeyong, addressing the comment as if Jungwoo was not even there to hear him. “Usually the people you bring back look as if they’ve been living on the streets for a while before you found them.”

“Jungwoo isn’t some charity case,” argued Doyoung, pushing past his leader just so he could stand in a room where he felt safe. Jungwoo was hesitant in following him. “He’s taking someone else's place and Sooman shoved him with us.”

Jungwoo felt that he was being watched from the moment that he stepped through the door; the gaze of sixteen pairs of eyes who were not used to a new member was enough to feel like a burn, something Jungwoo wanted to run away from. He stood still.

“What are you good at?” asked Taeyong, once he had stopped looking over the boy like he was trying to decide whether to make a purchase.

“It depends what you mean by that,” answered Jungwoo, as soon as he had managed to take in the surroundings that were unfamiliar to him. He would have been lying if he had said that he was not intimidated. Doyoung had told him about their leader, about Taeyong, but there was something about coming face to face with him that was more than Jungwoo had expected. The sharp jawline, the cold gaze – they did not match up with the soft, almost childish personality that Doyoung had explained Taeyong would have around those he was comfortable with.

“You need to have some useful skill, or else Sooman would have killed you instead,” explained Taeyong. “Come on, what is it? Are you good with computers? We need someone to help Mark, he’s getting too tired and he’ll start making errors. Or are you light on your feet? We need someone to replace Ten seeing as he got himself seen.”

“It’s not just me,” added Ten, his voice cold. “Maybe he can take Yuta’s job. He was useless when he got him too and we still found something he could do.”

Jungwoo could see a disgusted look in the face of a boy who sat shirtless on the floor by the only window, a look that suggested he would have run over there and demonstrated what is position was on Ten if it had not been for the stained bandages wrapped around his abdomen. “He looks pretty useless,” commented another boy, a smaller one. He had draped himself across the arm of an old, faded sofa. “Are you sure we haven’t just been given another Sicheng?”

“Donghyuck,” interrupted Taeyong, through gritted teeth. “Shut up, now.”

“What? I’m just saying that if this new kid is useless, he can do what Sicheng does. All he can do is sleep around and…”

“If you don’t shut up this minute, I will tell Sooman that it was your fault we nearly blew that mission a month ago and we’ll see what happens then, shall we?”

The threat hung in the air; Donghyuck chose to listen to it and remain silent. The hurt look on Sicheng’s face remained, keeping the bitter feeling growing in Taeyong’s mind as he turned back to the boy he was supposed to be introducing to their group. “I’ll do whatever you need me to,” answered Jungwoo, after a moment of silence taught him that he was expected to answer. “I’ll try it, whatever you need.”

If Taeyong had been about to give an answer, he was interrupted by the sound of a pop song ringing through the cheap speakers of an old mobile phone. The ringtone did not match the environment; Jungwoo found himself watching with interest as the owner of the ringtone took the phone from his lap and answered it immediately with a soft voice – then the ringtone made sense, matching the innocent and almost childish look of its owner. Sicheng’s young demeanour contrasted with the situation as much as his cheerful pop song did.

There was nowhere in the apartment to answer a phone call in private; when someone had to speak, it was just polite for the rest to remain silent so that the conversation could be fully understood in case it involved important information. It was a rule that Jungwoo picked up on very fast, staying quiet so the buzzing voice on the other end of the call could relay everything that it needed to a listening, reluctant Sicheng. As soon as the phone call ended, Sicheng pulled himself up from the floor with the softest of sighs, a defeated look on his face.

“I’m sorry, Sicheng,” added Taeyong as the young boy headed for the door, his tone full of genuine remorse that Jungwoo was almost surprised to hear. “Don’t let anyone hurt you, yeah?”

“I’ve done it before,” reassured Sicheng; Jungwoo noted his accent, something he was not used to. Sicheng ran a hand through his hair, trying to tame it. “I look okay, right?”

“You look beautiful. As always.”

Taeyong’s words made Sicheng smile again, until Yuta interrupted with a laugh. “I wouldn’t say ‘beautiful’,” he argued, keeping a hand pressed on his wound as he tried to find a more comfortable position to sit in. “I’d definitely take you home if you offered me a drink in a club, though.”

“That’s because you’d take anyone home if they were promising to sleep with you,” countered Johnny. “It’s okay, Sicheng. It’ll be fine. If anything happens, anything you don’t want just…just call us, okay?”

“I will,” answered Sicheng. He always made that promise. He never kept it.

Once Sicheng had left, the attention was focused back onto Jungwoo. He dropped his backpack to the floor; he had to at least look as if he was staying. “Is he going to be okay?” he asked, gently nodding at the door where Sicheng had slipped out of. “He didn’t seem okay.”

“Don’t worry about Sicheng, he’s a little fucked up,” reassured Taeil, a smirk on his face that Jungwoo was growing to resent. “It’s fine. You’ll fit right in, once everything fucks you up as well.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you see anything that it might be worth including a warning for at the start of a chapter, let me know. I'm not too used to publishing this kind of thing and I know I'll probably overstep a few boundaries in terms of things like that, I'm sorry <3

 Sicheng took another sip of his drink, still unsure of the taste but swallowing it only because he could feel the alcohol burning the back of his throat. He was certain this was not what he had ordered – maybe the loud music had muffled him, or his accent had just confused someone else – but as long as it got him drunk, it was doing what he wanted it to. It was sweet as well; that was a bonus.

He had already seen the man that he had been given the description of, someone tall with bleach blonde hair who suited the aesthetic of the club far more than Sicheng did. He looked confident, self-assured, and he had already smiled when he had seen Sicheng glancing in his direction. It was easier when they were already eager.

When the seat beside the man became empty, Sicheng took his drink and forced himself to move closer. He was watched with every movement, until he put his drink down on the counter and took a seat next to a complete stranger. “I saw you staring,” he announced, trying not to wince when he heard his Chinese accent creeping into his speech due to his nerves. “I thought I’d come closer so I was easier to look at.”

“You’re pretty easy to look at wherever you sit,” replied the man; his speech suggested he must have drunk more than Sicheng had. “Can I buy you a drink? You look like you’ve nearly finished that one.”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

“What kind of drinks do you like?”

“Something sweet.”

“Just like you, baby.”

Sicheng smiled as the man ordered a drink he had never heard of before, taking the glass from the bartender and taking a sip to find it had a lot more alcohol in it than he was used to. It still tasted sweet, and a little more alcohol running through his system would not hurt tonight. “Do you like it?” asked the man, and when Sicheng nodded a smirk spread across his face. “There you go, I bought you a drink. You should at least tell me your name now.”

“Ah,” murmured Sicheng, taking another mouthful of his drink. He had watched it closely, just to make sure that it was only alcohol and nothing more sinister slipped inside. “Why don't you call me Winwin?"

“Is that your name?"

The man edged closer, placing a hand on WinWin’s knee whilst the younger boy tried to resist pulling away. Sicheng instead placed his own hand on top of the one that now rested on his leg. “Let's just say it is."

The man was quiet for a moment, the music overtaking their conversation. “It's cute,” he decided. “I prefer cute guys.”

“It’s good I’m here, then.”

Sicheng took another drink, this time emptying his glass. It was not long before there was another in front of him, the man ordering one for himself as well. “Who gave you permission to wear that?” he asked, after finishing his new drink in just one movement. “Wearing a tank top and shorts in a place like this. You don’t want to give off the wrong impression, do you?”

Copying the action of the man, Sicheng finished his drink in one try as well. “What impression do you want me to give off?” he tried, putting the empty glass on the counter. The man replied with a soft laugh.

“We should probably get you out of here if you're going to start talking like that,” he murmured, putting an arm around Sicheng’s shoulders. “We don’t want anyone trying to do whatever they want with you, do we?”

After a moment of hesitation, Sicheng leant into him and pulled his arm tighter. “I’ll go with you if you buy me another drink,” he whispered, knowing that he was barely audible over the music but seeing the man smile as Sicheng leant his head onto his shoulder. Sicheng himself was already light-headed from what he had already drunk, his Korean and Mandarin starting to slur together in a drunken mess of words if he did not try his hardest to concentrate on the exact situation in front of him. If he wanted to be fully in control of the rest of the task he had been given, the last thing he needed was more alcohol.

Alcohol made it easier; Sicheng took the drink off the man and put it straight to his mouth.

This one was stronger, the taste of alcohol not hidden behind some sweet flavour but rather waiting to completely overtake him. When he stood up, the floor moved beneath him and the larger man beside him had to catch him to stop him stumbling. “Careful now,” he reassured, as Sicheng clutched at him just to stand straight; he hated how desperate he seemed. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” muttered Sicheng, trying to ignore the smell of cigarette smoke that filled the man’s jacket. “I…you drunk more.”

“I think I can take it a little better, sweetheart.”

The man hailed a taxi once they were outside. Sicheng was willing to do many things, but he was not willing to die in a car crash for this man who was clearly not sober. He put his own hand into that of the man who was steadying him whilst they were waiting, until the man's hand migrated down and held Sicheng at his waist. Sitting beside the man in the close environment of the taxi, the smell of cigarette smoke and alcohol was almost overwhelming. Sicheng could feel his heart began to palpitate as he forced himself to edge closer and rest his head on the man’s shoulder. There was an arm around him, holding him close but also preventing him from running away. The driver of the taxi watched them curiously whenever he stopped the car at a red light, staring at them through the reflection in a rear-view. “I’ve seen this happen before,” he commented eventually, and Sicheng felt the man beside him tense up at the voice. “Are you sure he’s old enough? Don’t want the two of you to get into trouble.”

Sicheng’s hand was held in a tighter grip. “How old are you?” asked the man, turning to him and placing his forehead against Sicheng’s own.

“Twenty,” answered Sicheng.

“Are you sure?”

“Did you want to check?”

“No, I trust you, baby. You need experience to draw me in like you did.”

Sicheng felt nauseous; he was not sure whether it was the taxi ride, the alcohol or the situation. As a tremor ran through his body, the man beside him took it as just the night air’s chill and moved to shrug off his jacket until Sicheng shook his head and murmured that he was okay, repeating it when no one seemed convinced. “You seem nervous,” was the reply, something that Sicheng tried to laugh away as if it had not been said at all.

“I drunk too much,” he tried, burying his face in the man’s jacket again to seem closer to him. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise, sweetie. Everyone drinks too much sometimes.”

The driver of the taxi watched them closely when they arrived at the apartment, as the man dragged Sicheng out of the leather seating with one hand and a strong grip. Sicheng stood, shivering, on the pavement, whilst the man paid for the journey before the taxi pulled away and he was left alone with the man, late in the night, with only a handful of stairs to climb before they reached his apartment. His hand was taken again.

“I’m warning you,” explained the man as he pulled Sicheng up the fight of stairs as if he could not wait any longer; the lift had been out of order. “My – my nephew lives there too, but he won’t hear us.”

“You sure?” asked Sicheng, watching as the man fumbled around in his pocket to find his apartment key, before struggling again as he tried to fit it in the keyhole. He had been expecting this; it was what he had been told in his phone call.

“He’s never woken up before,” smirked the man, pulling Sicheng into the apartment by the scruff of his shirt before slamming the door and pinning him up against it. “You sure?”

Sicheng wanted to say no. He nodded his head, just as the man pushed forward and placed his lips against Sicheng’s.

 

“Here,” explained Mark, pointing at the lines of code that spread across the dim screen of his laptop. Jungwoo sat beside him, still sheltering under the blazer of his uniform, tried to read what was being pointed at but only growing lost with every explanation Mark gave him. “If I delete this, your entire record at the school will just disappear into thin air.”

“Completely?” asked Jungwoo, wide-eyed. “That quickly?”

“It’ll be like you never existed,” confirmed Mark, and Jungwoo watched as he took out the code that he had said linked to Jungwoo’s life in such a large way. “Which is what we’re going for, of course. If we get rid of you, it’ll be harder to catch you if anything goes wrong.”

“And it will be like I never went there?”

“Exactly. People will still remember you, I can’t change that, but officially, you’re gone.”

Jungwoo was almost fascinated; he hated it, almost. It was interesting to watch as his entire existence was erased from everything through the small boy’s quick typing and excitable personality. It had begun small, with social network profiles and pictures. Then, it had escalated until Mark had managed to get in and take away school records, bank details, even the government record of his foster family, until there was just nothing left. “You’ll be much harder to trace now,” continued Mark, smiling to himself when he saw how intently Jungwoo was watching him. “Obviously, we’re still not done because people are going to wonder how you disappeared so, slightly uncomfortable question – how do you want to die?”

“As soon as possible,” murmured Yuta, from his place lying on the floor, until Donghyuck forced him into silence with a short kick to the head.

“He asks that the everyone,” he added, nudging Yuta again as he whined about how he was already injured. “Don’t think you’re special. I can’t even remember what I chose.”

“Suicide?” suggested Mark, nudging Jungwoo when he noticed the colour draining from his face at the thought “Or do you think that's too dark? Suicide is better because no one will try to look for you, but if you want to say you got kidnapped and killed instead...”

“I mean,” murmured Jungwoo. “That’s kind of what happened?”

Mark laughed; Jungwoo liked the sound, it filled the room and made it feel more like a home. “We’ll do that, then,” he muttered, turning his laptop screen so he could see it clearer as he began to type. “You have to be careful this way though. If people think you are kidnapped, they might try looking.”

“He can stay with me,” added Yuta, pulling himself into a sitting position.

“We don’t want to torture him like that until at least the second week,” smirked Taeyong, and Jungwoo felt a faint smile spreading onto his own face. “Mark, stop scaring the poor kid by talking about death. Don’t let him worry you. It’s not great, obviously, but we don’t get many people who die. As long as you follow orders…”

“I followed orders and I got shot,” interrupted Yuta, a grimace on his face. “I might die. Kun, am I going to die?”

“If you keep asking me that question, I’ll make sure you do,” retorted Kun, glaring at the Japanese boy before turning back to Chenle and Renjun and continuing to teach them the Korean vocabulary they were still sometimes lacking. Yuta sighed, before falling back to the floor.

 

Sicheng woke up with a pounding head that reflected his quickened heartbeat, the strange and unfamiliar bed clothes feeling rough and painful against his bare skin. The man beside him still slept, the scent of cigarette smoke and stale alcohol make Sicheng feel even more nauseous than when he thought about the night he had spent there. He had done it for a reason, but the mission he had been given became his second priority compared to his aching head.

He forced himself up, gritting his teeth through the wave of sickness that overtook him at the slight movement because of the alcohol he had drunk the night before. He had been hungover before, almost frequently, but this somehow felt worse. He reached down to retrieve his shirt from the floor, pulling it over his head and trying to move so as not to wake up the sleeping man next to him. When Sicheng was fully dressed, he stumbled out of the room and went straight for the kitchen sink.

He did not even bother to try and find a glass. Instead, Sicheng turned on the tap and cupped his hands to collect the ice-cold water before holding it to his lips and gulping it down as fast as he could in the hope of rehydrating his frail body.

“You look like shit. Did you want painkillers too?”

Sicheng turned, nudging the tap to stop it from running as his eyes landed on a younger boy – tall, well built, but definitely young – sat at the kitchen table with a collection of textbooks and paper in front of him. He did not answer as first, watching as the boy pushed back his chair and moved to a cupboard to retrieve a packet of tablets before throwing them. Sicheng fumbled as he tried to catch them, the strange boy laughing as the painkillers fell to the floor and Sicheng was forced to retrieve them with a blush on his cheeks.

Sicheng did not want to accept the help, but he took two of the white pills from the packet and swallowed them down with another gulp of water from the tap. “You’re different from the people he usually brings home,” mused the boy, sitting back at the table and watching as Sicheng wiped away a trickle of water from his chin. “Don’t think you’re special, he brings back people all the time. How old are you?”

Sicheng swallowed. “Twenty,” he answered, his voice hoarse as he tried to speak as the younger boy smirked at him. It was clear that he did not believe him, but he was willing to let it pass as he picked up a pen from the table and went back to the work in front of him.

“What are you doing?” asked Sicheng, after watching the younger boy work for a few minutes as he moved to stand behind him to get a closer look. The page was littered with simple Korean characters, interspersed with Chinese and passages copied straight from a textbook. The boy tried to hide it when Sicheng came over, but Sicheng was quicker and took a sheet of the paper right out from under his arms. He switched into a language he was more familiar with. “Oh, Chinese? Can I speak Mandarin with you? It’s a lot easier with a hangover.”

At the sound of someone speaking in Mandarin, the boy’s eyes widened. “You can speak Chinese?” he asked, and Sicheng could not help but smirk.

“I’m from Zhejiang,” he explained. Conversation was coming more easily to him now. “Chinese is easier than Korean anyway.”

“You sounded pretty fluent last night.”

This time, the smirk changed hands. As the boy took his sheet back from a wide-eyed Sicheng, the smile on his face was one of someone who knew he had found his upper hand. “He said you wouldn’t be able to hear us,” murmured Sicheng as his face fell, downcast. The boy laughed.

“He says that to everyone. If I’m awake, I can hear everything. I try to ignore it.”

The look of disgust on the boy’s face was enough to cheer Sicheng up a little, the slightest form of revenge enough for that moment. The nausea was beginning to wash over him again, just from standing too long, and Sicheng found himself having to take a seat and holding his head in his hands as the boy sighed, recognising familiar warning signs. When Sicheng looked up, he had placed a glass of water next to him which he took without hesitation and lifted to his lips.

“I don’t need your help,” argued Sicheng, once the glass was empty and placed back on the table beside him. “It’s just a hangover. I’ve gotten drunk before, it’s fine.”

“Look,” retaliated the boy. “When you live with him, you get used to nursing hangovers. It’s fine. You don’t even look old enough to be out of school, let alone getting drunk and sleeping around with guys you don’t even know. What kind of a name is Winwin anyway?”

Sicheng looked up at him. “I never told you my name.”

“You don’t need to. He was screaming it loud enough last night that I think the whole apartment block knows your name."

“Stop,” interrupted Sicheng, taking the cold, empty glass and placing it to his forehead. “Your voice – it hurts my head, okay? Winwin is just a nickname because no one here cares about my real one. It’s Sicheng, if you care. What about you?”

“Lucas.”

Sicheng laughed; he could not help himself. “What kind of a person would call himself Lucas?” he asked. “Come on, Yukhei, I’m sure you could have done better.”

The boy hesitated, the pen that he had been using to put more notes onto his sheets of paper hovering in the air beneath a shaking hand before he recomposed himself, returning to his writing. “Lucas,” he repeated. “It sounds kind of like Yukhei, I guess. I guess your hangover is messing up your hearing.”

“Or I just know that you’re trying to hide something,” tried Sicheng. Yukhei stopped writing again, placing his pen on the table with a slow, steady movement. Sicheng had listened to Doyoung talk before; he might not have understood all the words or what order they came in, but in Mandarin, it was easier to emulate his smooth tone and persuasive technique. Sicheng used it occasionally, when he needed to convince the others to do something for him, and when someone he needed information off needed more persuasion than just a pretty face. Now, he used it on Yukhei. “I don't know why you thought Seoul would be a good hiding place seeing as we're all here.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” argued Yukhei, picking up his pen but not resisting when Sicheng reached forward to pull the paper away from him.

“You ran off to Thailand,” continued Sicheng. “And when that didn’t work out for you, you ran here. You’re wrong. We found you. You have to come with me.”

Yukhei signed; there was a slight fear in his eyes that Sicheng did not like. “This doesn’t explain why you came all this way just to sleep with some old guy who is willing to fuck anything that even slightly moves.”

“Don’t fight back at me with that,” fought Sicheng. “I didn’t come here for that. I just did what I had to do to get to you, because if I don’t take you back with me, then I’m going to die.”

The word ‘die’ hung in the air like a threat, even if it was not a direct threat to Yukhei. He moved his head to his hands, looking as if he was suffering a hangover worse than Sicheng’s with the colour draining from his face. “Can’t you just pretend you never found me?”

“I didn’t put myself through a night with him just to go back and get myself shot in an alleyway. Haven’t I suffered enough?”

Despite the situation, Yukhei found a smile creeping onto his face. When he took his hands away from his face, Sicheng stretched across the table and placed his own hand to try and comfort the younger boy. “It’s not perfect,” he murmured. “It’s nowhere near, but it’s not bad. There’s other people, lots of foreigners. Anyway, it’s not like you can escape Sooman now. You’re lucky he gave you a chance. Are you going to come quietly?”

Yukhei smirked. “You didn’t last night.”

Leaning forward to put his head on the table, Sicheng dug in his pocket to find the phone that he always kept with him. “That’s it,” he argued, finding a number in his phone and putting it straight onto speaker phone. “If you’re going to be difficult, I can find help because I don’t want to die.”

Sicheng switched to Korean as Yukhei’s eyes widened.

“Johnny? Can you get here? I need someone stronger, someone more violent…”

“I’ll come with you.”

“Ah, it’s okay, Johnny, it doesn’t matter anymore. I’ll let you know if I need you.”

Sicheng ended the call with a smirk, a smile of success as he looked over at the reluctant, almost broken Yukhei. “I don’t want to go with you,” murmured the younger boy, and Sicheng tried not to feel guilty.

“You don’t have a choice, but I’m not mean, I promise,” he reassured. “Come on, we need to get going. We need to be back at the safe house by evening in case there’s something for us to do. Do you have anything you want to bring?”

Yukhei was reluctant, pushing his chair back from the table. “No,” he answered, quietly. “I couldn’t bring anything with me from China when I ran. Kangin – that’s his name by the way, he probably didn’t tell you – just gets me what I need now. I can’t leave because…I don’t know, I thought you wouldn’t find me.”

“I don’t know how we found you,” shrugged Sicheng. “I just got the phone call to come and get you, and I needed to get into Kangin’s apartment to do that and I just found the easiest way.”

“He’s definitely easy,” smirked Yukhei. The smirk fell faster than Sicheng had hoped. “He listens, you know. I mean, if you tell him ‘no’ and push him off enough times, he eventually just falls asleep. It’s easier when he’s drunk.”

Sicheng paused for a second. “I don’t want to ask how you know that.”

 

Johnny knew that he had been called as a threat, and Sicheng’s soft voice had made him laugh when he thought about the younger boy trying to work on his own. He knew that he was capable, and frequently did something like this, but the thought of their sweet Sicheng managing by himself was enough to bring a proud smile to Johnny’s face.

“Was that Sicheng?” asked Taeyong softly, watching as Johnny put his phone down. With no excuse for all of them to leave the apartment, the summer heat had soon lulled them into a quiet afternoon that was preferable to their usual action-packed evenings.

“Yeah,” replied Johnny, trying to adjust himself into a more comfortable position without waking up the sleeping Ten who had fallen on his shoulder.

“Is he okay?”

“He seems to be.”

“Did the guy hurt him?”

“The guy he’s meant to be collecting or the other guy?”

“Both.”

“He seemed fine, Taeyong.”

Taeyong took this answer, resting his head back on the threadbare sofa. It felt like that was the best of a worst situation; he did not like thinking of Sicheng’s role in the group too much, always reminding himself of the young boy who had joined them straight from China. When Sicheng had first appeared in the dorm, he could barely order food or ask for directions but when it came to it, he was able to enunciate sentences in Korean that would make the other members blush. Taeyong had not wanted to ask about it, but he quickly learnt why when Sooman himself took control of how Sicheng was used.

“Did Jaehyun go and get food?” asked Johnny, finally nudging Ten from his shoulder when their combined body heat got too much for the small apartment in the summer. The smaller boy complained, but it was half-hearted and he soon fell back into his nap. Taeyong shrugged, succumbing to the heat himself.

“Yeah,” answered Taeil, from the other side of the room. His head was pushed up against the dirty glass of the window; it was cool, and it gave him a good view of the city. “We didn’t have any, and now we have two extra mouths to feed. It’s only Ten and Yuta who can’t leave, and not as many people recognise Jaehyun.”

“I’m pretty sure the person who runs that store knows exactly what’s going on anyway,” smirked Donghyuck; he lay on the floor, but he could not quite sleep. “We could probably send in Yuta covered in blood and she wouldn’t care as long as we paid her the right money and didn’t make a mess of her shelves. No one is going to go around showing off that they know what Sooman is doing, unless they want to be found dead in the Han River.”

The conversation was interrupted by a soft knock at the door, and then a sound that seemed distinctly like someone resting their head against the wood with more force than they had originally intended to. “Hyung,” murmured Sicheng, his voice muffled but familiar through the wood. “It’s too hot outside. Come unlock the door.”

Taeyong pulled himself from the sofa, leaning against the door like Sicheng would be on the other side. “It’s too hot inside as well,” he warned. “Have you got him?”

“Yukhei? Yeah, I have him with me,” answered Sicheng, and then his voice grew quieter as he turned behind him and murmured in Mandarin. “Yukehi, say hi – he’s not going to bit you.”

The was a moment of silence, and then an unfamiliar and unexpectedly deep voice answered in rough Korean. “I’m here. Um…hi?”

Taeyong unlocked the door and pulled it open, noting Yukhei’s height as the first thing he considered about the new boy. He looked young, an appearance that could have been threatening softened by the piercings in his ears, but he was tall.

Sicheng stumbled in, collapsing against a wall with exhaustion clear in the bags under his eyes. Kun moved to him immediately, placing a hand to his head. “You’re okay, right?” he asked in Mandarin, softly. “Did he touch you?”

“Did you think I went back to his apartment to play Monopoly?” retorted Sicheng. “I’m used to it, it’s fine. I’m just hungover.”

“He didn’t put anything in your drink?”

“Kun – it’s just a hangover. I’ll be fine.”

Kun did not looked convinced, but he settled for the answer and went to get Sicheng a glass of water. They usually drank straight from the tap, Kun having to wipe a glass clean on his jacket just so the glass was clear again before he gave it to the boy who drank it thirstily. “I’ll get Jaehyun to get painkillers for you,” he added. “I ran out trying to keep Yuta quiet, and you look like you need them.”

“He had painkillers when he woke up,” interrupted Yukhei, trying to ignore the turning of heads as the quick Mandarin erupted from his mouth in response to what he was seeing. “I gave them to him, about three hours ago now I think. I don’t know what the timing is but, you know, don’t want an overdose.”

Kun smiled. “That’s useful, thank you.”

“You’re from China too?” asked Chenle, kneeling up from behind the sofa to get a closer look at the newcomer. Yukhei laughed slightly, nodding when Chenle seemed to grow in excitement.

“Great,” murmured Doyoung. “We just need a couple more members and we’ll be able to rival the United Nations.”

 

Yuta knelt in the bathroom, alone. The door was locked behind him but it did nothing to muffle the excited chatter of a new member, everyone trying to find out everything they could from Yukhei whilst he tried to form sentences fast enough. When he failed, Kun would translate for him. Yuta had nothing against new members, but he disliked the excitement around them. It reminded him of when he had first arrived. He did not like to think of that.

He had retrieved his phone from the floorboard, holding the growing screen to his ear and listening as it rang once, twice, three times. He needed whoever was on the other end to pick up. Yuta had already decided he needed to speak in Japanese, hoped that the person on the other end would understand him; no one else could hear this.

“Hello?” asked a voice, distorted through the phone. With the greeting, Yuta sighed with relief and allowed the familiar voice to wash warmth over him. He had wanted to hear it for so long.

“Hansol?”


	4. Chapter 4

There was a chill in the air of Hansol’s apartment, something that bit and clawed at any exposed skin even in the height of summer heat. The air was filled with the noise of a dripping roof; the room itself had no water, no electricity, no furniture. It was not his – the ‘for sale’ sign was still in the apartment window – but it was somewhere that he could live until he had to move again.

He had bought dog food from a nearby convenience store earlier that evening before coming home, pushing open the door that no longer offered any resistance with the broken lock. His two puppies were excited enough to eat from two cracked plates he had found as if it was a brand-new dog bowl, their tails whipping between the whitewashed walls and the bare floorboards as they stained their white fur with the brown gravy of the cheapest food Hansol had been able to find.

He threw himself down onto a threadbare pile of blankets, trying not to wince at the pain when the landing was harder than he had expected. His tank top did nothing to stop the cold chill in the damp air, so he wrapped a blanket around his shoulders as he took his phone from his short pockets and held it in his lap. He could not get a glass of water from the tap. He could not turn on a light to fill in the darkness. He could not turn on the heating to keep himself warm. It was not much, but for then at least, it was home.

His phone began to vibrate almost as soon as he got comfortable, Yuta’s nickname and profile picture filling the screen. Hansol took a moment to admire it, a carefree picture they had taken together near the window of their old safehouse, before finally answered. Yuta would only call when there was something urgent; it was not the time to fall in love with his features again.

“Hello?” he asked, almost cautiously, as he waited for Yuta’s reply to buzz through his phone speaker. A dog joined him, Latte, and Hansol let him sleep on his lap in the hope of extra warmth.

“Hansol?” asked Yuta, and Hansol felt his heartbeat quicken at the sound of Yuta’s voice. “Do you still remember what I taught you?”

The flurry of Japanese that left his old friend’s mouth was almost too much for Hansol, but he slowed himself down. He thought about it carefully. It had been a while, yes, but Yuta had always taught him that learning a language was like riding a bike. If he practiced enough, it would come back to him. “Yes,” he answered, hesitating slightly. “Why are you speaking Japanese?”

“The others can’t know I’m speaking to you,” explained Yuta. “And if they do hear me, I don’t want them to understand. If they think I’ve gone mad and started talking to myself, well, that works as well.”

Hansol bit his lip. “Do they still not know?”

“You know I can’t tell them. You’re dead, Hansol. You always will be. I’m sorry.”

“Why are you risking that secret to phone me? You could have just texted, I would have answered. I always do.”

He could hear Yuta sigh on the other end of the phone, the boy lowering the volume of his voice. In the silence, Hansol could make out a series of muffled voices which must have been coming from beyond the bathroom. The safehouse was never quiet. “I needed to hear your voice,” answered Yuta, after some time. “I couldn’t remember it. I just wanted to hear you speak.”

There was a desperation and fear in Yuta’s voice that send a warning sign pulsing through Hansol’s mind, something the exact opposite to the confidence he had fallen in love with. “Yuyu,” he murmured, almost imagining Yuta softening at the nickname. “Are you in trouble?”

“No.”

“Are you going to die?”

“It’s no more likely than usual.”

“Are you injured?”

Yuta was silent; Hansol was vaguely aware of the last conversation that had had over a series of text messages. “Yuyu,” he tried, again. “Where did you get shot?”

“It’s not important.”

“Yuta.”

Hansol leant back, his rucksack and hoodie acting as a pillow in his nest of blankets on the floor of the abandoned apartment. Another dog joined him, sharing warmth. “It was my stomach,” explained Yuta, after another moment of coaxing.

“That’s a pretty serious place to be hit.”

“If Kun hadn’t found me, I’d have been dead. I was bleeding out on the floor of a convenience store just begging that no one would find me before Kun did and I couldn’t think of anything else but you.”

“That’s sweet.”

“No, I’m serious. I genuinely thought I was going to die, Hansol. I thought that was it and…and if I had died, no one would have known. I wouldn’t have anyone who could tell you. I’d just have stopped replying to your messages, and you would think that I was just ignoring you. You would think that I was just being an awful person and that I’d forgotten you, and I didn’t want to die knowing that you would think I’d abandoned you.”

Hansol did not reply; a dog buried itself into his neck, vying for his attention. Yuta continued.

“If I do die, I want to die knowing that you know I love you. I’d never abandon you, even if I was given no other choice. If I do ever, you know, just go silent – I just don’t want you to think that I’m leaving you on purpose. It means I can’t get to you, and if I’m dead then…then maybe that’s for the best.”

“Don’t speak like that, Yuyu.”

Hansol rolled to his side, draping an arm across both of his dogs as they nuzzled closer to him. “Have you been back home since you got out?” asked Yuta, ignoring the concern in Hansol’s voice.

“You mean, gone back to Busan?”

“Yeah, to see your family.”

He thought about it for a second. “I saw my sister. She thought I was dead anyway. It was probably worse because I had to tell her that I was alive and then I had to leave again. I couldn’t stay there. I took my dogs and some of my stuff and then left just in case Sooman found her and put her in danger. I haven’t seen my parents though. I don’t want to put them through this.”

“You’re in Seoul, then?”

“Outskirts, but yes. I have to move a lot though. I don’t know where I’ll be.”

“Can you come and see me?”

Hansol hesitated; that was a dangerous request. “I don’t know, Yuta. I can’t go near them.”

“I need to see you. What if I die and I never see your face again?”

“You’re not going to die.”

“I get a lot closer than you think.”

Latte twitched, whining in her sleep as a nightmare began to interrupt her rest. Hansol tried to calm her by stroking her soft fur, propping himself up on his elbow to stop himself from falling asleep with Yuta’s soothing voice in his ear, even with what was being said. “I want to see you too,” thought Hansol, aloud. “Do you know how dangerous that would be, though? If anyone saw me, he’d kill me. You know that’s not even an exaggeration, he’d just do it. It doesn’t even have to be NCT. If anyone sees me in Seoul, Sooman will know and he will find me.”

“I need to see you. Please, Hansol. I was so scared that I’d lose you when I was shot.”

“You not going to die.”

Yuta’s voice thickened; Hansol could not remember the last time he had heard him cry. “He’s brought in two new people, Hansol. They’re so young and they don’t even know why they’re here…”

He trailed off. Hansol could almost feel tears brimming at his own eyes. “Yuta,” he whispered, hoping he could be heard. He did not want to hear the boy crying, being silent. He needed to hear him be himself. “Please keep talking. When you go quiet, I know it’s bad.”

“The last time Sooman brought in new members,” continued Yuta. “We lost Kaicheng and Yuzhi. He always brings in someone new so that they can be fully ready when they need to take over because someone dies, or disappears. Sooman is either going to put us through something dangerous, or he’s taking two of us out of the group and if Ten and I are already on house arrest…”

“You can’t get into more trouble.”

“He won’t know. I need to see you, Hansol.”

Hansol knew it was not a lie, or an over-exaggeration. Sooman knew exactly who we wanted to take up places in NCT, and when he changed his mind, he would change it fast with replacements barely being trained before they were forced to take over. He had experienced it himself; he was a replacement, just like a handful of other members, and he knew that he would have been replaced when he had died. Yuta had talked about the young boy a lot – Chenle was much younger than him, and a sniper, but he made up numbers.

“You have to promise me something,” demanded Hansol, trying to keep his voice from trembling. “You have to promise that you’ll never speak like you did earlier. You are never better dead, Yuyu. You’re better than that.”

“I’d be free from this, wouldn’t I?”

“I couldn’t cope if I knew you were dead. I love you, Yuta.”

“If you love me, then please come and see me. I need this Hansol. I can’t keep doing this. I have to go, they’re getting suspicious now. Please just say you’ll come.”

Hansol hesitated.

“Hansol, please.”

“Okay,” promised Hansol, a chill running through his nervous system at the thought of it. “You haven’t moved, right?”

“Same place. Meet me in the alleyway outside, tomorrow night. I love you, Hansol.”

Yuta hung up before Hansol could reply.

 

Jaehyun kept the hood of his jacket tight around his face, more out of trying to disguise himself rather than to keep warmth. In the summer evening, the hot air was making his hoodie almost unbearable but he kept it on in the interests of safety as the fluorescent lights of the convenience store lit up his face against the darkness of the evening outside. The young boy behind the counter noticed the doors open as he grew near, flashing him a smile through his round glasses. It was the slightest smirk, one that acknowledged anyone shopping at this hour did not want a conversation but still deserved a welcome, and Jaehyun appreciated it. The previous worker for that shift must have left and been replaced, but that did not matter. This new boy would not know anything and Jaehyun needed that. It was difficult to feed eighteen boys without alerting anyone’s attention; the rotating staff of the convenience store had grown used to the teenage boys arriving late in the store with varying states of injury to buy their entire stock of ramen, but they knew it was safer to not ask questions if they wanted to keep their job and, in some cases, all of their limbs.

Knowing where the ramen was from numerous other visits, Jaehyun headed straight for the familiar shelf and filled his arms with as many bags of the instant noodles as he could carry before almost throwing them onto the counter in front of the small boy who did his best to scan everything as quickly as he could.

“Are you sure you only want ramen?” he asked, watching Jaehyun fill his backpack with the food he had already scanned. “Looks like you’re feeding a lot of people.”

“Can’t spend too much money,” explained Jaehyun, taking the plastic card from his back pocket and pushing it across the counter to the boy. “Cheapest food we can find."

The boy shrugged in acknowledgement, readjusting the glasses on his face as they slid down his nose. “Make sense.

“You work so late,” commented Jaehyun, watching the boy pick up his card. “What do you even do here?”

“Look at Tumblr, mainly.”

As the boy charged his card, Jaehyun decided he was not surprised. “Nothing else?”

“Take pictures of the moths that get drawn in by the light on the drink machine?”

“It sounds fun.”

“It’s not. They pay me, though.”

The boy smiled as he handed the card back to Jaehyun, asking “did you want anything else?” in a soft voice that could barely be heard above the buzzing of the lights. Jaehyun paused for a second, throwing his backpack over his shoulders.

“Painkillers. What’s your name?”

The boy cocked his head, reaching across the counter to a shelf nearby that was filled with boxes of tablets. “My what?”

“Your name. You’re nice. I’m trying to be your friend.”

He blushed as he laughed, hiding his smiling behind his hands. “Oh,” he murmured, turning away. “Seokyu.”

“Are you working this shift every day, Seokyu?”

“Probably.”

“I’ll see you around, then.”

Jaehyun waved as he left, watching Seokyu wave back before picking up his phone and returning to the aimless world of social media. He knew that he could never get too close to anyone outside of his own team, but Jaehyun liked to be friendly when he was given the chance, just to feel as if he had a chance of having a normal relationship with anyone.

 

 

“I’ve got the food,” called Jaehyun, his voice muffled through the door as Taeyong dragged himself from the sofa to open it for their delivery. “Painkillers for the baby too, just like Kun asked.”

“Shut the fuck up,” retorted Sicheng, taking the packet from the boy as soon as Jaehyun entered the room and scrambling to find another glass.

“He’s got a hangover so he’s tetchy,” apologised Yuta, leaning against the doorway to the bathroom. “This life would be a hell of a lot better if we could all spend our evenings going out, getting drunk and getting fucked by whoever thought we were pretty enough.”

“Yuta,” warned Taeyong, locking the front door again with ice in his tone. “Silence, now.”

Rolling his eyes, Yuta moved further into the room and sat himself on one of the dirty kitchen counters with his head resting against the wall. Jaehyung dropped his backpack in the space next to him, pulling out the packets of ramen and gesturing for Jaemin to join him in unwrapping the food and dropping it into a pot that they filled with water and set to boil.

“You’re cooking for eighteen now, remember,” called Doyoung, watching Jaehyun turn around with a look of confusion. “You haven’t met Yukhei and Jungwoo yet, have you?”

“We’ve got newbies?”

Jungwoo raised his arm in a rough attempt at a wave; Yukhei barely nodded his head. Jaehyun just raised an eyebrow, before turning back to the pot and adding another pack of ramen to the half boiling water. “I hope you like ramen.”

“You better,” smirked Yuta. “There’s fuck all else to eat.”

“Can you stop ruining the babies’ innocence?” tried Taeil, gesturing at the youngest members of their team.

“Chenle has literally killed people, I don’t think saying ‘fuck’ is going to ruin them anymore than they already are.”

 

Once there was food, the conversation in the safe house stopped. The eighteen boys squeezed as close as they could around the pot, armed with chopsticks and shovelling the food into their mouths as fast as they could in the hope of getting the largest portion before the pot was completely cleaned out. Sicheng barely ate, taking a few mouthfuls before deciding he was too nauseous to eat anything and lying down on the floor beneath the window.

Jungwoo reached forward to take another bite, knocking against Yukhei’s arm as the Chinese boy moved forward at the same time. Their eyes met, a shy but acknowledging smile being exchanged as they learnt towards the food. “You’re new too, then,” murmured Yukhei, quiet enough for his voice to be hidden behind the sound of food. “How long have you been here?”

“About five hours,” answered Jungwoo, and Yukhei laughed.

“Still longer than me.”

There was a moment of silence between the two boys, before Jungwoo glanced at Yukehi and asked “where were you before this? If you’re from China, I mean.”

“Staying with a friend,” shrugged Yukhei.

“What was he like?”

Yukhei gestured towards Sicheng as he napped on the floor. “Have you worked out what he does yet?”

“I think so.”

“I lived with the kind of guy who was happy to get him drunk and fuck him even though he looks about fifteen.”

Jungwoo paused. “He sounds nice.”

Their brief conversation was interrupted by the ringing of a phone, Taeyong dropping his chopsticks with a sigh as took the phone from his pocket. “If it’s for me, tell him I’m dead,” whined Sicheng, forcing a small smile on Taeyong’s face as he answered the call and scrambled into the kitchen so he could speak in private to whoever wanted to get in contact.

Whilst their leader was busy, the remaining boys scraped the pot clean and Jisung even picked it up to drink the soup as his frail arms struggled to hold the weight. The silence continued even when the food was gone, exhaustion finally creeping up on the boys when they realised that it was now nearly dawn and they were not going to be called out for anything. Ten fell asleep against Johnny again once he was full, resting his head on his shoulder until Johnny wrapped an arm around his shoulders and supported him.

“You can let him sleep,” called Taeyong, covering the phone with his hand so that the person on the other end of the line could not hear him speak. “You need to sleep too, Johnny. He has a job for Johnny, Ten, Jaehyun, Doyoung and Taeil tomorrow.”

“Ten can leave but I can’t?” replied Yuta, his tainted with bitterness.

“Is it something that’s going to kill us?” interrupted Doyoung.

“No, I don’t think so, unless the other team is feeling trigger happy…”

“There’ll be others?”

“It’s nothing different to what we’ve done before. I’ll go with you.”

Taeyong murmured something down the phone, before hanging up and placing it carefully back in his pocket. “We’re basically body guards,” he explained, lowering his voice so as not to wake Ten. “Sooman is using EXO to do a drug deal, and he wants us there in case it all goes wrong. It’s pretty early though, we need to sleep.”

“Do you want me to work with Yukhei to make him disappear?” asked Mark, but Yukehi shook his head.

“No,” he answered, barely audible. “I – I’ve been hidden for a while, you don’t need to do that.”

“How good is your Korean, Yukhei?” prompted Kun.

“Not horrific, not fluent. I can do Thai and Mandarin.”

“You can talk to Ten and us then, it’ll be fine. Sicheng couldn’t speak at all when he came.”

“Well,” smirked Yuta. “He was pretty good at begging.”

Sicheng stayed quiet for a moment, his arm across his face to block any traces of light hitting his eyes. “You’re just jealous I never begged for you,” he retorted, turning his head just enough to see the blush creep across Yuta’s cheeks.

 

Ten tried to keep his eyes open, resting his head against the wall behind him. He had had three hours of sleep since resting his head on Johnny’s shoulder, something he was not proud of, but now it was his turn to stay awake and keep guard just in case something happened. It was unlikely to be anything dangerous, but someone needed to be awake at all times in case Sooman decided he needed to be in contact instantly.

He wanted to sleep, but it would be a disaster if he drifted off and Sooman found it was Ten who was supposed to be answering his calls or opening the door. He was taken off house arrest; he did not want to be back on it.

From his position underneath the window, the sleeping frames of the other members were barely visible in the dim glow of distant streetlights. Sicheng had been given the sofa, Renjun curled up next to him with an arm around him to stop him from falling off. The features of both Chinese boys were soft in the light, much younger than the things Ten knew they were capable of.

Taeyong was the most heartbreaking when he was asleep, someone who took on a tough leadership role that had been forced on him when he was awake but soft and vulnerable as he dreamt, his hands constantly clawing out. He had admitted to Ten once that he had always slept with a stuffed toy, something Ten had originally laughed at, but seeing a sleeping Taeyong always reaching out for the source of comfort he could no longer have was enough to make Ten feel guilty that he ever ridiculed him.

The two new boys slept together, not close enough to show they were good friends but just with enough distance to offer comfort in an apartment where they knew no one else. They slept near the youngest members, the ‘babies’ who always slept beside each other in what became a nest in the corner of the room. Ten was certain that Jungwoo and Yukhei were not even properly asleep. If he looked, he could see Yukhei’s eyes glinting, watching him, rather than being closed.

“Yukhei,” whispered Ten, tilting his head to get a better look at whether the boy responded or instead went back to pretending to be asleep. Yukhei propped himself up on one elbow, moving so as not to wake Jungwoo who had managed to fall asleep in his unfamiliar environment.

“What?” he asked. Ten had been expecting to hear the slightest amount of exhaustion in his voice but there was nothing; Yukhei was still wide awake.

“When you got here,” asked Ten. “You mentioned Thailand, right?”

“I did,” explained Yukhei. “I’m half-Thai. I ran there when I left China.”

“So you came from Thailand?”

“Yeah, why?”

Ten smiled fondly, but it did not fill his entire face. “Me too.”

Yukhei sat up fully; he knew he was not going to be able to sleep, and Ten looked as if he would collapse if someone did not keep speaking to him to distract him. “That’s cool,” he smiled. “How did you get here, then?”

The smile fell from Ten’s face. “By plane?”

“No, I mean – I guess I meant why you’re here, not how.”

“Ah.”

Ten stopped, hesitated, as he took the time to think about how he wanted to reply to the question. He settled on “I pissed off the wrong people,” and left it there. Yukhei knew well enough that it would been have been impolite to ask further, but Ten saw the expression on his face and volunteered more information without being asked.

“I got into the wrong kind of group, it wasn’t anything serious. I was flexible and fast and – I guess I was just good at climbing up drainpipes and sneaking in through windows. It just ended up more serious and we ended up angering someone. I don’t even know who it was, just someone who was under Sooman and we ended up tied in something much darker and it was a lot more trouble. I don’t mind it here and there wasn’t anything in Thailand anyway, the old group was falling apart. It’s just…it’s not home.”

Ten trailed off; Yukhei did not know what else to do, so he nodded. “What about you?” Ten asked, eventually. Yukhei bit down on his lip.

“I…” he started, Ten watching him carefully. “It was my dad, he was just involved with Sooman somehow and he decided he didn’t want to be anymore, so he tried to run and Sooman found him. He was killed, and Sooman wanted me. I don’t know, maybe it was to be a replacement or maybe he just wanted one more ‘fuck you’ to my dad or maybe he was just desperate. I ran, made it to Thailand as fast as I could with whatever money was left in my dad’s account before Sooman could take it, and when I started being chased in Thailand, I ran here. I thought he’d never look for me in the city where he wanted me to be. I offered some guy at the airport the rest of my money to let me pose as his nephew without asking any questions and he took it without even thinking about it. He was kind of a dick, though…”

Ten could not help but smirk. “Sicheng seemed to agree,” he laughed, nodding a little towards the sleeping boy on the sofa so that Yukhei knew exactly who he was talking about.

“It sounded like they were having fun anyway,” murmured Yukhei, and Ten found himself having to cover his mouth to prevent his laughter from waking anyone else. “I can keep watch, if you want. I mean, you look tired…”

Ten shook his head as an interruption, still grinning. “Can’t let you do that,” he argued. “Taeyong would kill me. We can’t have a newbie on watch until they’ve proven they aren’t going to kill us in our sleep, or rather until they prove they know what they’re doing. I’ll wake Yuta up to keep watch in a minute. He doesn’t have to wake up in the morning anyway.”

Ten waved his hand in Yuta’s direction, the Japanese boy sleeping sat against a wall with his face hidden behind the hood of his jacket to help Yukhei learn who was who in the team. Yukhei responded with a nod, trying to commit the slumping figure to memory. “Won’t he get mad?” tried Yukei, and Ten shrugged.

“I feel like Yuta’s always mad now. He’ll be better when he can leave the house again, I promise. It’s just that he doesn’t like it when things go wrong and the fact he got shot – he sees it like he failed.”

Yukhei nodded; Jungwoo stirred beside him, rolling onto his side and make Yukhei move further away so that he did not accidentally wake him up. “I’ll wake Yuta up now,” Ten relented, pulling himself onto his knees and moving towards the older boy. “I need to sleep. You should sleep too.”

“I don’t know if I can,” murmured Yukhei in response.

“No one does, not on their first night here. You’ll get used to it soon.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't write violence, this fic was a bad idea lmao

“Sicheng,” murmured Kun, gently shaking the younger boy awake by his shoulder whilst trying to to wake Renjun who was still napping beside him. “Sicheng, you need to get up. I want to talk to you.”

Sicheng’s eyes fluttered open, vulnerability hidden in his tired gaze as he rubbed at his face and ran a hand through his hair which had become untamed after a night on the sofa. He sat up when Kun tugged on his arm, his legs thrown across the arm of the chair as he yawned and tried to focus on the words being spoken to him.

“Sicheng,” repeated Kun. “I need to teach you something, okay? I have to go somewhere and I’m leaving you in charge.”

“Where did everyone else go?” asked Sicheng, waking up enough to look around the room and notice that barely anyone was left in the apartment. Those who were still there were still sleeping, the early morning sun barely streaming through the window.

“Remember there was another job this morning?” tried Kun, watching as Sicheng turned back to him and nodded slowly. “Johnny, Ten, Doyoung, Taeil and Taeyong all went on that, and Jaehyun drove them.  Yuta can’t go, obviously, and the babies and the two newbies are still sleeping. Can I leave you in charge?”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m running low on supplies, okay? I talked to Sooman and he’s letting me trade with another group who owes us a favour. I don’t know when I’m going to get back and I need to change Yuta’s bandages today so I was hoping you could do it.”

Sicheng’s face fell, wrapping his arms around me. “I don’t know how to do that.”

“It’s easy, trust me. You just need to take his old ones off, check over the bullet wound and replace them with new ones. I’ve shown you how to bandage someone before, right?”

Sicheng nodded. “Exactly,” continued Kun. “It’s no different to that. You just need to check that the wound is healing right. All you need to look out for is whether the wound is infected, but you can easily judge that yourself. If you’re suspicious, you can tell me when I get back and I’ll look at it. You just really need to look out for blood poisoning. He’s still really pale and I’m getting worried. Obviously, a would like that will bruise but if you see anything like, purple bruising or streaks running up his body away from the wound then you need to call me immediately, okay?”

“Okay,” answered Sicheng, almost whispering as he tried to take in the list of instructions he had been given “When do I have to do this?”

“As soon as he wakes up, okay? I know he doesn’t like admitting he’s in pain so I think it might be a lot worse than Yuta is actually making out. He likes you though, he’ll let you do whatever you need to. I need to go. Can you do this for me?”

“Of course.”

Sicheng smiled, Kun ruffling his hair as he picked his bag from the floor and swung it over his back. Taeyong had given him a spare key so that he could easily get in and out of the apartment as he needed, and Sicheng was soon left as the only one who was still awake in the apartment.

 

“Stay,” warned Taeyong, holding a hand back to stop Doyoung in his tracks as the others moved behind them. “I think we’re close enough here. We don’t need to get involved, we’re just back up.”

The car park was hidden in shadows of a nearby tower building, allowing the five to remain hidden in a span of darkness whilst the action unfolded in the distance in front of them. Jaehyun had stayed in the car, preparing to drive away as fast as the car was able to in case everything went wrong but Taeyong had approached the mission as leader with a strange air of confidence. They did not have to get involved; they just needed to watch with loaded weapons and intervene if what was happening in front of them became violent.

“It’s just EXO,” reassured Doyoung, nudging Taeyong slightly as the older boy took a loaded pistol from his coat pocket and readied it in a tight grip. “They don’t turn violent unless they have to, so I’m sure we won’t have to do anything.”

“The last time they met with this group, they lost members,” answered Taeyong, motioning for Doyoung to keep his voice down. “We’re taking no chances. Our ‘bullet proof boy scouts’ tend to be a little trigger happy, otherwise Sooman wouldn’t have sent us.”

“What are they even trading with them?” asked Ten. “Sooman doesn’t deal with other groups like this.”

“He’s got surprisingly good connections. It’s easier not to question it and just do what he says.”

“It’s probably just drugs or something,” added Johnny, nudging the smaller boy with his arm when he realised their leader was not going to give Ten a straight answer. “Sooman will trade them somewhere else, get profit, I don’t know what he does with them if we’re being honest. It really shouldn’t be anything dangerous but Bangtan are a notorious gang to deal with. They like to fuck with us.”

“Let’s just say EXO and Bangtan do not get on well,” murmured Doyoung, keeping his eyes fixed on the distant figures as the transaction began. “It’ll get violent unless they’re feeling merciful.”

“They’re never feeling merciful. Why do you think we’re here?”

Taeyong waved his hand, indicating to the rest of the group that they needed to move closer. The car park that his them with concreate columns was also home to several cars that offered them cover to hide behind. Johnny stayed close to their leader, whilst the other split up into pairs and moved forward to hide behind the metal barricades.

“Why are we moving closer?” murmured Johnny, as Taeyong peeked around the hood of a car now that both of the other groups were straight in his vision.

“Bangtan have a weapon,” he commented. “They’re hiding it behind them, and I don’t think EXO know. We need to warn them.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

Taeyong moved as close as he dared, watching the scene unfold whilst his own team waited for further instructions when he had decided how best to deal with the situation. Taeyong himself did not know, trying to get the attention of one of the EXO members to pass on the knowledge of what he had seen before anything went wrong.

The gunshot was deafening.

The members of NCT threw their hands over their ears as a reflex, ringing filling their heads as the noise subsided and the tallest member of the enemy time stood, laughing, as the closest member of EXO crumpled to the ground without a chance of survival. In the moment of shock, Bangtan took the moment to re-aim their pistols.

Taeyong did not hesitate; with a shout to his members, they reclaimed the element of surprised that they had lost in an instant. The sight of a dead body did not bother them in that moment when the thought of revenge was the only thing that forced their limbs to move forward.

Ten took the first shot, aiming for the man who had shot his gun first and although he did not kill him, the bullet pierced through his shoulder and weakened his grip on the gun enough for it to fall from his hands when Doyoung charged into him, knife blade glinting in the brief ray of sunshine from the outside streets. They gave EXO the time they needed to reassemble themselves, arming the unit with their own weapons whilst Bangtan was preoccupied with avenging the death of their leader after Taeyong had fired another bullet straight through his neck.

The grey concrete of the car park became stained with crimson.

 

Sicheng was sat in the kitchen with his hands cupped around a glass of water when Yuta woke up, the Japanese boy pulling himself to a sitting position despite the effort and pain that movement caused him. The brief colour in his cheeks faded to grey as he leant back against the wall, short of breath even from just the slightest of movement. “Kun gave me instructions for when you woke up,” called Sicheng, even though Yuta ignored him in favour of using the black of his phone screen to glance at his own face and scowl at the pale, sickly looking boy that scowled back. “He said I needed to change your bandages over.”

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” argued Yuta, putting down his phone to turn his attention to the Chinese boy who was climbing down from the kitchen counter and coming to kneel beside him. “You’re going to fucking kill me.”

“I’m only changing over your bandages,” protested Sicheng; Kun had left him a small kit of everything he needed, the same supplies that he usually carried around in his bag. “Take your shirt off.”

Yuta smirked. “I have been waiting my entire life for you to say that.”

Sicheng scowled, hitting Yuta on the chest before taking the hem of his t-shirt and lifting it above his head to expose Yuta’s bare chest and bandaged abdomen. “You’d love for me to do this more often, wouldn’t you?” teased Sicheng, throwing the shirt to the floor beside him. Yuta flinched at the pain as Sicheng began to peel the bandages away from the healing wound. “Don’t get excited, there are babies nearby.”

“There’s always the bathroom.”

Sicheng stopped being careful with the bandages, pulling them away with no concern even when Yuta winced and tried to pull away from Sicheng’s touch. “You could be a little nicer, you know,” he complained, teeth gritted in pain as his bullet wound finally met the cold air beyond the bandages.

“I’ll be nicer if you are,” retorted Sicheng, moving closer to Yuta to get a better look at the wound with Kun’s specific instructions in mind. The flesh itself was healing, knitting together in the time it had been given even though the flesh still looked angry and raw. Kun had not been joking when he had mentioned bruising, the skin around the puncture turning tender shades of blue and yellow after the impact it had undergone. When Sicheng touched the skin below the wound, it felt warm to the touch and worried him but there was no other indication that demonstrated the infection Kun had told him to look out for.

“Go on then, Doctor Sicheng,” announced Yuta, trying not to pull away from the feeling of Sicheng’s cold hands on his bare skin. “You’re the expert, apparently. Am I going to die?”

“I don’t think so, unfortunately,” smirked Sicheng, taking a clean set of bandages and beginning to wrap them around Yuta’s stomach in the way that Kun had taught him during his first few weeks in Korea.

“Next time you undress me, you have to buy me dinner first.”

“You are never going to be that lucky.”

As soon as he was done with his chore, Sicheng threw Yuta’s shirt back at him and turned his back. “Don’t I even get a kiss?” pouted Yuta, but Sicheng shook his head as he stood back up.

“The others are still sleeping,” he commented. “You’d get too excited and wake them up.”

“I’ll be quiet.”

Sicheng smirked. “Next time, if you’re good.”

 

 

 

Kun held his breath, his face obscured by the shadows of the buildings that encompassed him as he waited in the alleyway. He hated being alone, his hand nervously wandering to the pistol he kept obscured in his jacket pocket just in case something went wrong and he was unable to take control of the situation. Sooman had managed to set up this trading deal in just a matter of minutes; Kun did not know who he was meeting, or how amiable they would be to his existence

The sound of traffic from the rush hour beyond his shadows seemed forbidden to him, as if the existence of other people beyond Kun’s narrow world was something he was not allowed to be experiencing. He could barely remember the last time he had been allowed outside, both alone and in daylight, and somehow it was more worrying than late night missions with the guarantee of danger.

“Are you Kun?”

He jumped, more than he had wanted to if he was going to appear strong in the presence of another team. Kun composed himself quickly with a deep breath before turning his back on the road outside of his alleyway, looking into the shadows to meet the eyes of a delicate face, her k hair framing a soft jawline. She spoke with an accent that Kun could not place, trying to remember where had had heard it before as he nodded.

“Did you come alone?” asked the girl, her eyes briefly flickering to look at the space behind Kun as she crossed her arms across her chest. Kun felt more comfortable when he could see that there was not a gun in her clasp, but he could not say the same for the bag on her back.

“Of course,” he answered, staring her down. “That was the terms of the agreement, right? Did you come alone?”

“No,” smirked the girl. “I trust that you did. As long as you don’t cause trouble, you don’t need to worry about the others. They’re just there as a precaution.”

Kun tried to shrug, unsure of how best to respond. “I’m just here for the medical supplies. I won’t cause trouble.”

“Why do you need medical supplies so badly that you’ll work with us?”

“You don’t need to know that. That wasn’t the agreement.”

The girl laughed; it reminded Kun of the sound of a music box that would always play during a horror movie. “You see,” she crooned, taking the bag from her back and holding it to her chest so that Kun could not grab it. “I’m the one who has exactly what you needed. You obviously need this desperately, or else Sooman wouldn’t dare call in his favour with Hyunsuk. Anything I say becomes part of the agreement, because I’m the one who decides whether you leave with these supplies, or whether you leave at all. Now, I’m asking you again – why do you need these medical supplies?”

With a glare, Kun risked a step forward. “One of our members got shot. That’s all it is.”

“So, you’re one member down. Who was it?”

“It was police, not another group. It doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“Your failed bank heist, right? It was all over the news. That’s not a good sign for a heist.”

Kun scowled; he had no answer. “It looks like Sooman is letting his reputation slip with you rookies,” continued the girl, but her grip on the bag loosened. “If it was up to me, I wouldn’t even give you this. We worked hard to get them, took down someone from JYP and took every supply we could get our hands on, but we owe you. Apparently.”

She threw the bag to the floor, almost laughing at the sight of Kun scrambling to his knees to take it for himself before she could change his mind. “Look at you,” she taunted. “Sooman’s team is meant to be so great and yet, there’s a member kneeling right in front of me. You’re not so great now, are you? When your friend recovers from this gun wound, tell him that he owes Jennie a favour.”

With a blush spreading across his cheeks, Kun stayed on the floor to undo the bag and check that the girl – Jennie – had kept her half of the bargain. It was stuffed full of the medical supplies that Kun had needed, bandages winding their way around antiseptics and painkillers. “You don’t trust us?” crooned Jennie. “Come on, Kun. If there’s anything out there about us, it’s that Black Pink always stay loyal to their side of a deal as long as you don’t try and double cross us.”

“You’re Black Pink?”

Kun’s hand stopped halfway between fastening the bag, his head shooting up to meet the gaze of the girl who stood above him. The explanation of why she seemed familiar fell into place in his head; a group of ruthless girls, working directly for Yang Hyunsuk, who had achieved more in a few short weeks of existence than most groups would be able to claim in a lifetime.

“I’m glad you finally recognised me,” she smirked. “I was expecting my reputation to precede me, but I guess Sooman keeps you locked away from the world more than we assumed. You’re starting to fall, Kun. Sooman won’t rule this city for much longer. If you make one wrong move between here and your little safehouse, you’re dead. I’m not on my own, and I never will be.”

“You’re going to follow me?”

Kun’s voice was tinged with defiance, enough to cause Jennie’s smile to fall into an ice-cold gaze as she stepped forward and stood right beside his crouching frame. By now, he could feel the chill of the alleyway’s pavement creeping in through the thick denim of his jeans. “Hyunsuk has eyes everywhere,” confirmed Jennie. “If you go against us, you’ll be dead before you even realise we know. We’re not the only group looking out for him. Sooman was risking a lot bringing us into this, but we don’t work like that.”

Jennie crouched down, tucking a hand under Kun’s chin and lifting it until he was staring directly at her.

“You owe YG from now on.”

 

“What the fuck happened?” was the first comment uttered as Taeyong and the remainder of the team pushed their way into the safehouse with their clothes and flesh painted crimson with blood. Kun had not even had time himself to sit down from getting back from his own mission, but his attention was instantly drawn to the tired faces and stained outfits which suggested injury. “Did you get hurt?”

“We didn’t get hurt,” reassured Johnny, as the rest of the small group moved to the kitchen sink in an attempt to scrub the stains from their skin and clothing so that it would not act as a reminder. “People got hurt, yes, but they weren’t us.”

“Who was it?” asked Mark, coldly.

“EXO are down two members,” answered Taeyong; his voice was emotionless, the room filled with the sound of running water as he desperately rubbed at his skin to hide the evidence of what he had done. “Yixing was killed, and Jongin was shot pretty bad. We didn’t have chance to stay around and see if he lives, but Sooman will deal with it. He’d going to want to take BigHit down as soon as he can for what they did today.”

“BigHit only have a handful of people anyway,” reassured Donghyuck. “They’re never a threat unless they manage to get the upper hand on us, and we’re expecting it now. There’s only, like, seven of them.”

“There’s four now,” answered Ten with the slightest smirk, wringing out the water from his t-shirt even though the white fabric was not entirely clean; he knew that the remnants of their gunfight would not ever be fully removed from his clothing. “Taeyong’s quite the shot, you know. Doyoung’s handy with a knife too.”

“You killed them?” asked a wide-eyed Jisung.

“We had to. They attacked our family, we attack them.”

Taeyong spoke as if he was demanding an end to the conversation, voice firm as he rubbed his face with an old towel and ran a hand through his now-dripping hair. The shadows under his eyes were growing more prominent, a sallow expression hiding under the determined glance as he moved back towards the rest of the group. “We need to be prepared,” he continued, hiding the shaking of his hands by placing them in his pockets. “EXO are getting weaker if they keep losing members, so Sooman is going to turn to us if he ends up being threatened by another team. He doesn’t want to replace who they lose like he does with us.”

Sicheng reached up, taking a fistful of fabric from Taeyong’s damp shirt and pulling on it until the older fell back to sit with him on the sofa, his scowl softening when he saw the worried expression on the young boy’s face. “You were shaking,” murmured Sicheng, resting his head on Taeyong’s shoulder now that he was beside him. “You need to sit down. You were worrying me.”

“I’m okay,” reassured Taeyong, resting an arm across Sicheng’s shoulders. “I told you, I didn’t get injured at all. It was EXO who were caught in the gunfire.”

“Yes, but you _killed someone_ hyung,” whined Sicheng. “I know you don’t like doing that.”

“They deserved it, and I’ve done it before, you know this. It gets easier every time you do it.”

Yuta scowled, watching the two closely as Sicheng leant into their leader. “It doesn’t,” he corrected, Taeyong biting his lip. “It never gets easier. You’re just saying that to make him feel better.”

“Why are you so bitter about everything?” interrupted Doyoung, raising his voice to be heard from the other side of the apartment whilst Yuta watched him from his seat on the floor beneath the window.

Yuta wanted to reply with a sarcastic remark, something that dripped with confidence which provided a shield that he could hide behind. Instead, he lowered his head and began to trace images in the dust on the floorboards. “I’m sorry,” he apologised, trying not the react to Doyoung’s surprised murmur at the sound of a genuine apology. “I’m fed up of being stuck in here, and you got to go out and do things and just…I’ll make it up to you, if you want. I’ll do your lookout shift for you tonight so you can sleep, because you look like you need it.”

Moving closer, Doyoung leant of the back of the sofa. “You’d actually do that for me?”

When Yuta looked up to smile, it was genuine.

“Of course.”

 

Yuta had always enjoyed the sound of others sleeping; their soft breaths and snoring were like a lullaby, accompanied by the hush of the traffic of the city outside of their safe house. It had been the music of the city which had taken Yuta the longest to get used to when he had been forced to move there from Japan, loud noises and the sound of sirens even in the dead of night when Yuta had previously experience silence. For his first few weeks, he had barely slept at all without telling anyone the issue, until Taeyong noticed his growing exhaustion and came up with the idea of sleeping with the window closed and the curtains drawn so that the noise was nothing more than a gentle hum. The others complained that the room got too hot, but Yuta slept fully for a night and did nothing but thank Taeyong the next day.

His phone said that it was nearly time, Yuta’s face illuminating under its dim screen every time he unlocked it to see the countless minutes tick by. If he wanted to spend as much time as he could with this plan, he needed to leave then. Yuta pulled himself to his feet, the wound in his chest no longer giving him intense pain with each movement, and edged his way along the floorboards.

The snoring and slight movement of his fellow members were his indication, each step forward being interrupted by a pause as he checked to make sure that no one else was awake with the sound of his footsteps. Yuta’s eyes scanned over every member several times.

A pair of eyes stared back at him; they snapped shut.

Yuta paused. “Jungwoo-ah,” he hissed, keeping his voice barely above a whisper as he edged closer to the nest of blankets that the two new boys had chosen to sleep in. Yukhei seemed to be in a deep sleep, with his chest rising and falling slowly with each shallow breath. Jungwoo did not move. “Are you awake?”

Although Jungwoo hesitated, he opened his eyes and sat up on one arm, nodding slightly. Yuta pointed a finger at him. “If you tell anyone what happened, you’re dead,” he warned, and Jungwoo nodded with more conviction to convince the older boy that his secret would be kept safe. “You’re on watch whilst I’m gone. It won’t be long. If anyone wakes up and asks where I am, tell them I heard a noise outside and went to look for what caused it. Got it?”

Jungwoo nodded one final time, before Yuta turned his back. Taeyong had left the key to the front door on the kitchen counter before he slept, an action he always undertook in case someone knocked whilst Taeyong himself was sleeping. Yuta took this without a second thought, unlocking the door and escaping into the world outside.

 

It had begun to rain when Yuta unlocked the door of the fire exit at the bottom of their apartment building and stepped out into the space behind it. Here, it was impossible to be observed by anyone passing along the streets beside them. It was a concrete garden, housing only bins which had gone years without being emptied and surrounded by a chain link fence that had been tore apart by years of wear. The only light was a dim flickering streetlight.

Yuta did not mind; it was paradise, because Hansol was there.

He did not even stop to say hello, instead choosing to throw himself into the arms of the taller boy and to clutch around him as if he never wanted to let go. Hansol hesitated for a second, before returning the embrace tight enough to lift Yuta off his feet. The two stayed in each other’s arms for as long as Hansol could hold it, before gentling lowering Yuta to the ground and settling on just brushing a lock of hair away that had fallen across his face. “You need to be careful,” he murmured, and a chill ran through Yuta at the voice he had missed around him for so long. “You’re still recovering from a bullet wound, you dumbass.”

Yuta could not help but blush at the nickname. “It’s fine,” he reassured, grasping for Hansol’s hand as he moved it from his face. “It’s healing right, so I’m going to be okay. You need to stop worrying about me all the time.”

“I’m always going to worry about you.”

“I’m not a baby.”

“You’re my baby.”

Yuta playfully hit Hansol on the chest, but Hansol responded only with a deep laugh as he grabbed hold of the younger boy’s hands. The rain had already soaked him through, his hair sticking to his forehead and raindrops running down his cheeks in a way that vaguely resembled tears. “You didn’t bring me all the way here just to tease me for being overprotective, did you?” he asked, his breath warm as he brought Yuta’s hands to his mouth to quickly kiss them.

“I needed to see you,” answered Yuta, voice firm. “I wanted you to know that I love you.”

“I know that already, Yuyu.”

“Yes, but…I needed you to hear it, just in case it’s the last time. And I need to hear it from you.”

Hansol laughed again, Yuta blushing at his own comment as he pulled his hands away and his them in the pocket of his jacket. With a smile still on his face, Hansol placed both of his hands on Yuta’s shoulders and pressed their damp foreheads together. “Yuta,” he announced, feeling the heat of embarrassment radiate from the other’s face. “I love you, and I will always love you. I will love you through whatever fucked-up stuff you end up having to do. I will love you even if Sooman turns you into some sort of monster. I will love you until I cannot physically love you anymore.”

Yuta finally looked up, watching Hansol through the hair that had fallen across his face in the rain. “You won’t ever leave me?”

“I promise I won’t ever leave you.”

Hansol planted a kiss on Yuta’s forehead, feeling the younger boy lean into him and place his head on his chest. He wrapped him in another embrace. “Yuyu, you haven’t been sleeping enough, have you?”

“Your heart is beating really fast,” commented Yuta, ignoring the question. He took his head away, placing his palm where he had once been resting. “Are you okay? It’s not normally like that.”

Shaking his head, Hansol tightened his protective hold over the younger. “I was just excited to see you again, that’s all.”

“You’re lying.”

Yuta pulled away, looking up as the cold night air finally pierced through his clothing and caused him to start shivering. “You can’t lie to me, Hansol,” he continued, as Hansol looked down at the puddles forming beneath his feet. “Please, not now. I need every moment with you to be special, because it might be the last.”

“You know I won’t let it be the last time, Yuta. You trust me enough to believe that, don’t you?”

“I know what it’s like when you die.”

Teardrops were becoming mixed with the relentless rain. “I saw it,” continued Yuta, his voice growing strained. “When you left the first time, when you told me to tell everyone that you were dead so that you could get away. You were the first one to die in so long, they’d almost forgotten what it was like, but they also didn’t seem to care. We – we have a job to do, and they were so scared about remembering you in case it distracted them from what they were being made to care about. I don’t want to be scared of remembering you if I actually lose you.”

Hansol reached out, wiping the tears from the younger boy’s cheeks. “You know that every memory of you is an amazing one,” he reassured, moving his hands up to stroke Yuta’s hair as he spoke.

“If I had died when I was shot, I wouldn’t have gotten to tell you. You’d have just thought I’d forgotten you. You’d be scared of remembering me because you’d remember me as someone who abandoned you when I promised I wouldn’t.”

“I’ll never be scared to remember you, Yuyu. I’m honoured to have been able to spend time with you.”

Trying to stop his body moving with a sob as he took a deep breath, Yuta reached a hand up to wipe away any traces of tears that Hansol had confused with rain. He was shivering now, teeth chattering together in a way that caused Hansol to worry more. “You need to go inside,” he warned, taking Yuta into one last hug. “I’m happy that I got to see you. We’ll see each other again, I promise. I won’t let this be the last time.”

Yuta hugged back, holding Hansol as tightly as he could manage with his trembling frame. “How do you know that I won’t abandon you,” he asked, barely murmuring into Hansol’s chest. “I’ve done terrible things, Hansol. How do you know I won’t do that?”

When their embrace finally broke apart, Hansol smiled.

“Because, Nakamoto Yuta, I love you, and I will never stop loving you even after the day I die.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to quickly apologise because this is very much a filler chapter and it shows a problem I knew I was going to have with this fic. Honestly, when I started writing and planning this, it was entirely self-indulgent. I wrote it for fun, then shared it with a friend and then ultimately edited it and shared it here but because I wrote it only for myself at first, I didn't think about an audience. There's a lot of characters, some who aren't even NCT. In retrospect, I should have made NCT the different groups, not using so many companies, idol groups and trainees like I am because they're becoming bigger characters than NCT are in some cases. I hope you can put up with this, I'll try and minimise this in the future but the story I wanted needs side characters to work and with NCT all in one group, I need to drag others in. There's going to be a lot. Have fun.
> 
> Also, honestly, you can read this fic without known who any of the other idols are. You can just treat them as other characters; I know myself I use obscure unknown idols and they become pretty big characters when this is supposed to be an NCT fic, but you don't need to know who they are.
> 
> The focus will be on NCT as much as possible after this chapter, thank you for putting up with my self-indulgent writing style of "ALL THE CHARACTERS" because I know it has to be hard to follow <3

“We need food.”

Taeyong stood in the kitchen, his eye wandering over every counter and open cupboard as he looked for the tiniest scrap that he could feed to the rest of the group who waited, stomachs growling. “I don’t know how we finished everything Jaehyun got so quickly,” he added. “Sooman’s going to get mad if we keep bankrupting him with our food bill.”

“He shouldn’t have given us so many members then,” murmured Donghyuck, and Doyoung nudged him with his arm as a warning to keep silent.

“I’ll go again, if you want,” suggested Jaehyun, but Taeyong shook his head.

“You know we’re supposed to rotate people that leave the apartment for chores like this, just so that the people in the shop don’t get suspicious. We’ve used up our budget for this week anyway, I’m pretty sure. I’ll need to text Sooman himself and get permission.”

Collapsing on the floor beside the nest of threadbare blankets and jackets that the youngest members had collected for their bed, Taeyong allowed the dim light of his phone screen to light up the pale colouring of his face as he typed out a message to their leader. He was careful with his wording; always formal, always respectful, always making sure he never said anything that could be considered to be rebellious.

“I’m pretty sure that the guy who works the night shift at the convenience store is suspicious enough already, anyway,” added Jaehyun, speaking to no one in particular. “Some kid took over the night shift from the old woman, he can’t be that old. It must be like a student job or something. He hasn’t been there long, but he knows.”

“Do you think he’s part of something?” asked Ten.

“Another gang?” clarified Jaehyun, a melodic laugh appearing on his lips when Ten nodded. “I doubt it. He’s got pink hair, it’s the most obvious thing I’d ever have seen a gang member do if he is an enemy, and he wouldn’t be helping us if heknew as much as I think he does. Anyway, why would a gang member be working the graveyard shift at a convenience store? He’s probably just some kid who grew up listening to the stories on the news and he put two and two together.”

“He might have a smaller link, maybe,” suggested Taeil. “Most people do. Maybe a brother got mixed up in something.”

Jaehyun shrugged, leaning back onto the floor and closing his eyes. “Maybe,” he mused.

His reluctance to speak left the room in silence, a general lull falling across the boys as they fell into a half-asleep state of draped across the floor in varying levels of rest. It was the vibration of Taeyong’s phone that awoke them, their leader not even bothering to pull himself up out of his laid-back position as he dragged the phone from his pocket and held it in his eye line. “He says we can go,” he informed, reading the overly formal contents of Sooman’s message whilst paraphrasing to the other boys. “He says I can send Yuta, if you want to be off house arrest. Take someone with you, and don’t spend too much. Sicheng, maybe? He hasn’t been to the store in a while.”

Sicheng’s eyes lit up with a childlike fire at the sound of an outing. “Hyung? Can I go with you, hyung?”

Yuta only smiled and nodded.

 

Sicheng liked Yuta. Even if he tried to hide it most of the time behind sarcastic comments and broken promises that he would kiss him someday, there was something inside him that wanted to protect the older Japanese boy in whatever way he could so that he would never have to be without him. The had both come to Korea around the same time, thrown into a new world with a new family and a new language that neither could really understand, and so they had bonded only on the fact that although they could not understand each other, they could not understand anyone else either. Sicheng also admired Yuta for those first few weeks; whilst he had Kun who could translate for him, Yuta had done everything himself with no one who could speak his language. Now, he was almost fluent whereas Sicheng sometimes still struggled to form a sentence.

“Do you think we’ll be able to find anything other than ramen?” commented Yuta, slowing down his speech in the way he always did when he wanted to be considerate of Sicheng. The intermittent streetlights gave some colour to his cheeks, but the effects of his injury were still visible in his sunken eyes. “Sooman monitors our card but it would be nice to eat something else. It can’t be good for us.”

“Meat,” tried Sicheng, but he knew it was wishful. There was no chance. “There might be something else.”

“Rice,” suggested Yuta. “If they have something like that. It has to be better than the ramen, anyway. If it’s not too much, maybe I can buy you chicken, or ice cream. Jaehyun said that the boy that works here is nice. If you smile sweetly enough at him, maybe he’ll give you something for free.”

Sicheng did smile, the special kind of grin that he always fell into when he needed to convince someone to fall in love with him. Yuta smiled back even though he did not need any more reasons to stay close to the younger boy. The artificial light of the convenience store showed the pale of his complexion and the faint traces of bruises across Sicheng’s neck. Yuta did not ask; he knew Sicheng would not answer.

When they entered, the small boy behind the counter gave them a grin that matched the ones they both still wore. Although Jaehyun had told them of his pink hair, he had since dyed it black even though he still kept it hidden under a hat whilst glasses slipping down his nose at the slight movement at his face. “No one else comes here at three in the morning,” he commented, his soft voice nearly overtaken by the hum of fluorescent lights. “I don’t think there’s much left on the shelf, but there’s more ramen in the back if you need me to get some and…”

“We can’t keep eating ramen,” interrupted Yuta, confirming the cashier’s suspicions that they were shopping in the same way that Jaehyun had a few nights ago. “It’s not healthy.”

“It’s all I eat but I guess you’re right,” shrugged the cashier. “Okay then, what do you want? I can help you find whatever.”

“I doubt we’ll find cheap food that isn’t loaded with chemicals in a convenience store. I think it’s going to have to be ramen.”

For a second, the boy behind the counter watched then from behind his glasses, before shrugging his shoulders and saying, “you’d need to visit an actual supermarket for that kind of thing.”

“What kind of supermarket is going to be open this late?”

“I’m not saying that,” explained the cashier boy. “I live next to one. It’s kind of cheap. Like, I know it’s not convenience store cheap but they have a load of sales most of the time and I know the best things to get after shopping there with the world’s worst wage so, I don’t know. I could get you what you need and you could come by here tomorrow and I’ll give it you? You’d have to pay me, but I can charge it to your card as ramen so that nothing seems suspicious. I know someone watches your card.”

Yuta considered the boy’s offer for a second, moving closer to the counter with an intrigued Sicheng following him. “What was your name again? Seokyu?” he asked, and when the smaller boy nodded, Yuta smiled. “Seokyu, you’re an absolute angel. You’d do that for us?”

Seokyu nodded again, his smiling widening. “I don’t mind,” he shrugged. “It’s not out of my way or anything, and you always seem like you’re feeding a load of people. What do you want me to get?”

“Anything that doesn’t cost much, can be cooked quickly and can feed an entire group of people.”

“Vegetables, stuff like that? I don’t like vegetables so you’ll need to be more specific.”

“What kind of things do you eat?” asked Sicheng, and Seokyu shrugged his shoulders.

“Ramen,” he answered. “Meat, kimchi, sweet stuff. I don’t know. I don’t like most things. Where are you from?”

“What?”

“You don’t sound Korean, so where are you from? Unless you can’t tell me, obviously.”

Sicheng smiled as much as he could, lowering his face to hide the blush that spread across his cheek. He hated it when his accent gave him away as a foreigner as soon as he opened his mouth; it rarely happened to Yuta. “Oh,” he mumbled. “China.”

“Cool!” exclaimed Seokyu. “Me too!”

“Really?”

“I mean, I was born in Korea but I moved to China before I even finished elementary school so it hardly counts. I studied in Japan for a while too.”

“Japan?” asked Yuta, intrigued now that his home country was involved.

“Yeah! I’m fluent in three languages by now, and some English that I picked up somewhere. It’s my only selling point seeing as, you know, I moved around too much to actually graduate high school.”

Seokyu found paper and a blunt pencil from underneath the shop desk and underneath the flickering lights of the convenience store, the three sat together and compiled a short list of things that would be able to feed a house full of starving boys. “You’ll definitely want rice,” began Seokyu, adding that to the top of the list before proceeding to list the few vegetables he could name. Knowing that the other two boys with him were also speaking Korean as their second language, Seokyu did not worry too much about which language he could name the vegetables in. It flowed naturally, and soon the page was filled with neat scribbles in the three different languages, with Sicheng and Yuta beginning to add their own when they thought of something. “I can get that here for you tomorrow. Will you be able to come and pick it up?”

“Someone will,” nodded Yuta. “If it’s not me, you’ll need a way of knowing that I sent them so – so I’ll say that the mountain man sent them, okay?”

“Mountain man?”

“It’s a nickname, don’t judge me for it.”

“Trust me,” smiled Seokyu. “I’m judging you. Hard. Go and get some ramen so you don’t actually go home empty handed because I feel like someone will get mad. I’ll get the food to whoever you send by tomorrow.”

“You’re amazing for doing this. You know that, right?”

Seokyu blushed and bowed his head, pushing the oversized glasses back up his face. “I try.”

 

“You didn’t buy much,” commented Taeyong, unlocking the door for the two boys to come back into the apartment with only one half-empty bag of ramen between them. “Enough for one night at most? I thought we sent you out to get food for a week?”

“We set something up,” explained Yuta, throwing the ramen onto a nearby kitchen counter. “The boy at the convenience store – Seokyu, he said he’d buy actual food from an actual store and give it to us tomorrow so that we don’t have to keep feeding the kids on ramen.”

“So you’re dragging some innocent kid into this whole Sooman mess by getting him to help us?”

“Hyung, I’m asking him to go grocery shopping, not kill a man.”

“Of course not,” smirked Donghyuck. “That’s your job.”

Yuta silenced him with a glare, the younger boy shying away from the cold gaze and distracting himself by playing with a shoe lace. “He’s got a point,” shrugged Taeyong, before turning back to the rest of the group who were waiting in varying states of awake, sprawled across the floor. “Jungwoo, Yukhei – can you show you’re actually useful to us by cooking tonight? I really hope you can at least make ramen.”

Yukhei looked panicked, but Jungwoo had been a student long enough to know how to turn a packet of instant ramen into a meal and he took charge, with the other following any instruction Jungwoo gave him that he could understand. Yuta and Sicheng joined the rest on the bare floorboards, the Chinese boy stretching himself out in the thin stream of moonlight that shone in from the window in a way reminiscent of a cat.

“Does this mean we have to send someone out tomorrow to go and get the food off this kid?” asked Taeil, nudging Yuta as he sat next to him on the threadbare sofa and dramatically threw his head back in mock exhaustion. “Because we’re only supposed to leave the apartment when we’ve had instructions to.”

“Sooman said we can leave whenever we need food,” argued Yuta. “They didn’t have any more ramen anyway so we’d had have to go back whatever we did. It’ll be fine.”

“I just don’t think…”

“It will be fine.”

Yuta spoke with such conviction that Taeil did not want to argue with him, even when the younger boy seemed to drift into a half-asleep state that would have made his argument far less coherent if he tried to talk. He collapsed against Taeil’s shoulder without even realising it, and the eldest boy did not have the heart to push him away when he saw the sunken purple shadows underneath Yuta’s eyes.

 

Donghyuck’s features were somehow softer in the dark, when only the most prominent of curves in his face were illuminated by the outside streetlights as he sat up at the window and watched the busy streets of Seoul beneath him. He was supposed to be on guard, but neither Yukhei nor Jungwoo had the heart to pull the younger away from the window when he sat there with an entranced look. “Do you think any of them know we’re here?” he asked, keeping his voice quiet so as not to wake the others who slept around them. “In the cars, I mean. Do you think they know who they’re driving past?”

“Do we have that much of a reputation?” asked Jungwoo in the same hushed voice, Yukhei providing nothing but a shrug as his answer.

“People know about us,” answered Donghyuck; his childlike side was more visible by streetlight. “They know what we do even if they don’t know who we are. We’re – what’s the word, hyung? Notorious?”

Yukhei had not heard the word before, but Jungwoo hid the slightest of laughs behind his hand. “Notorious,” he repeated, rolling the sound around in his mouth before spitting it out. “I think I like the sound of that.”

“What does it mean, hyung?” nudged Yukhei, trying the pronunciation for himself with varying degrees of success. “Not…notor…”

“Notorious,” confirmed Jungwoo. “Famous for being bad.”

A silence fell. It matched the night air around them. “We’re not that bad, are we?” asked Donghyuck when he felt the silence had become too much. “I mean, we’re just doing what we’re told.”

“I’m not the person to ask,” shrugged Jungwoo. “I don’t know what you do. We haven’t been here long enough yet.”

Donghyuck climbed down from his perch at the window. Yukhei had almost been scared of the younger boy and his sarcastic comments in his first few days locked inside the apartment, but Donghyuck was the sort who grew on people once his shield was let down and his vulnerabilities were obvious. He was vulnerable; it was only there if you looked closely, if you knew exactly what you were searching for, but it became more obvious when he was alone with the two new members he had been told to watch. His weaknesses hid in the bags under his eyes, in the nightmares that haunted his sleep, in the memories that would traumatise an adult, let alone the fragile state of a lost and forgotten teenager.

“I can’t believe I have to babysit you two,” he jabbed, and Donghyuck’s vulnerabilities were hidden as quickly as they had been exposed. He hid behind a guard of confidence and insults, covering his own insecurities by mocking that of others. Yukhei could not bring himself to blame him. “It’s not hard to stay on watch and I can’t believe Taeyong-hyung wouldn’t let you do it on your own. He doesn’t trust you, you know.”

“Don’t blame him,” commented Yukhei. “We’re new. You guys are close. It has to be hard to let us in.”

Donghyuck rolled his eyes. “We get new people all the time, you’re nothing special. As soon as someone is dead, Sooman ships in someone else to take their place. I haven’t been here that long either and I’ve seen enough of it. Kaicheng was the first one I saw killed, and he was replaced with Kun which was good because we needed a medic. Then it was Yuzhi – he did something to piss off Sooman, no one knows what it was, but he was dragged from the dorm kicking and screaming by some guy and we haven’t seen him since. Yuta and Sicheng turned up two days later.”

With each name he mentioned, Donghyuck counted down on his fingers as if it was a hit list rather than some form of obituary. “Hansol-hyung was killed too. Chenle replaced him. It was weird to have someone younger than me join, but Chenle’s fun. You two are strange though. No one died before you came. Sooman’s been doing this a lot more recently. He keeps shoving people in, but no one’s leaving. We’re just getting bigger and bigger.”

Jungwoo nodded, not quite sure how to respond. “That’s why you two are so strange,” continued Donghyuck. “No one died. At least, no one died yet. We’ve already got two replacements and no one knows who you’re replacing. Everytime Sooman brings in someone like you, someone else dies. We’re just waiting to see who now.”

Donghyuck turned his back on the two newcomers again, moving to his place on the window where he could watch the cars going by. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he added as an afterthought. “Just consider it a warning.”

 

Yuta did not want to take Sicheng on their second outing to the convenience store. He had taken on glance at the younger boy’s sunken eyes and translucent skin and decided himself that Sicheng needed sleep more than anything else. Taeyong had been quick to agree and almost as soon as the sun had begun to set with orange streaks spreading throughout the city, the decision was made that Doyoung would accompany Yuta instead.

“Isn’t it a bit early for the late night shift anyway?” asked Doyoung, almost as soon as they had stepped out of the confines of the apartment. Yuta regretted bringing him already. “We don’t even know if the kid will be working yet.”

“The kid has a name,” retorted Yuta. “He’s doing something for us that could put him in danger and he’s not asking anything in return. You could at least have the decency to call him Seokyu. It’s not like he’s a kid anyway; he’s older than our babies. He’s probably a student or something.”

“I was just saying…” defended Doyoung, but Yuta cut him off with a dramatic sigh.

“You’re always ‘just saying’. You were against this plan from the start and I bet you still are. You’re just suspicious of Seokyu.”

“I’m more suspicious about what Sooman will do to him when he finds out he’s working with us.”

For this, Yuta had no answer. He walked a few steps ahead of Doyoung, keeping his gaze at the concrete beneath his feet to make sure that he did not step on any cracks that might have appeared overnight. He had always spurned the childhood tale he had heard of a death coming from a simple step in the wrong place, but he learnt that he was willing to do anything – even this – to minimise the amount of deaths he was responsible for. “It’s not like Seokyu is actually getting involved with us,” he tried, trying to defend himself. He did not want Seokyu to be another face that haunted him in a nightmare. “He went shopping like any normal person. Sooman doesn’t have to know that it was for us, or even that he went at all. We’re allowed to get food. Anyway, I know the graveyard shift starts at around this time. He should just be getting there now.”

“If you say so,” relented Doyoung, stopping for a moment to pull his hood tighter around his face before scampering after his friend who was still hopping along a pavement. It was rare he got to see the city at its prettiest time, when the strains of twilight were just breaking through the distant concrete jungle. It was a time like this that Doyoung missed the most, just an evening where he could wander through Seoul with a friend with no bounty on his head and no chance to get into trouble. Sunset felt almost normal, something Doyoung hadn’t felt in a long time.

“That’s the convenience store!” cried Yuta, almost stumbling in his hasty attempt to both stop moving and avoid one final crack in the concrete. Doyoung had not seen him like this for a while, Yuta’s original fun loving nature that he had displayed when he was forced into NCT gradually faded by the power of his role in the group. He expected it was something to do with the giddying freedom after his time under house arrest. “It’s the one we went to yesterday anyway.”

“It’s the one we always go to,” corrected Doyoung. “Because the one near the apartment asked far too many questions and someone would have got into trouble. This place doesn’t ask anything. It’s safer, for everyone.”

“Plus it sells the most ramen and it always has a new stock of it when we come back.”

“Yes, Yuta. That too.”

Doyoung did have to admit he preferred this convenience store. The fluorescent lights shone without flickering, the stock inside often far more extensive than anywhere else he had explored in Seoul. Even more, it reminded him of the convenience store nearest to his room when he attended university – he owed that place a lot, many late-night essays fuelled by their stock of iced coffee before Sooman had tracked him down and taken that away from him.

When they walked in, Seokyu did looked as if he had only just arrived like Yuta had predicted. He was in the middle of tying the green apron behind his back. He had placed his glasses on the counter; even from the entrance, Doyoung could see that they were only frames.

“Mountain man!” announced Seokyu as soon as he saw them approaching, a genuine smile spreading across his face that even Doyoung had to admit made him more approachable than he had thought when Yuta had first described him. “I’ve got you things. They’re under the counter, just a second.”

Seokyu was not strong; it was clear in the way he pulled the plastic bag from the floor, his arms trembling as his small frame tried to lift something that it was not built to lift. The thin handles of the bag almost broke under the weight, Yuta rushing over to help as a flush appeared across Seokyu’s cheeks and he muttered a weak thank you. “It didn’t even come to too much,” he announced, proud. “They know me there, so if I smile nicely enough and it’s already late, they’ll give me the things they have to get rid of. A couple of them might be out of date, but I hope you don’t mind. I got everything on your list!”

“You’re amazing,” was the only compliment Yuta could muster, rooting through the bag to find what treasure Seokyu had managed to scavage for them. “Hyung, look! It’s so much better than ramen. We can actually give the kids proper food for once!”

“I hope someone can cook,” answered a worried Doyoung, but his face lit up as much as Yuta’s at the sight of fresh vegetables. “It’s a lot. How are we going to pay for it?”

“It honestly wasn’t much,” reassured Seokyu. “I know you guys come in here a lot and you always buy the same thing over and over again, so I made sure not to go over that amount. If you pass me your card, I’ll just put it through the till as ramen so nothing is suspicious. It’ll be about the amount you usually buy.”

Doyoung did not want to admit that it seemed as if Seokyu had thought of everything; the young boy was almost perfect in his plan, with every loophole covered as if he had been thinking about it for some time. Yuta handed the younger boy their card without even a hesitation, and Seokyu did whatever he needed to create the fake receipt which would be all Sooman would see. “I can do this for you more often, if you like,” he asked, his tone dropping to something far softer as if he was afraid of rejection. “I know you come in here at least once a week, or at least someone does who takes all our ramen and makes it so I have to explain to hungry customers the next day that they’ll be nothing till we get our next shipment. I think that has to be you. I could bring you food like this if you wanted me to, instead. It isn’t any trouble for me, I swear and then…”

“Stop,” interrupted Doyoung. He could not look Seokyu in the eye. “Do you even know who you’re getting involved with?”

For a moment, Seokyu was quiet. He reached out to retrieve his glasses from the counter and slipped them over his ears; they made his face look smaller, even younger than before. “Who I’m getting involved with,” he repeated, focusing his attention on his reflection in the shop window to straighten his glasses. “Specifically? No, I don’t know who. Still, I have a pretty good idea about what.”

“How?”

Yuta’s tone was soft, comforting instead of accusing. Seokyu answered with a sigh and a small shrug. “When I said I was studying abroad in Japan, it was a lie. I’m sorry, please don’t be mad, it’s just – there were other things to do there. I wanted to go but, you know, not in the way I wanted. We worked between Korea and Japan a lot and they only really wanted me because I could speak Japanese so I never really did anything but, you know, I was still there. There were ten of us at our biggest but it changed a lot. Like, really a lot. I was there the longest. He got arrested eventually, the guy behind it. They let me go because I was underage so I came back here but you can’t really escape something like that.”

His confession was met with silence, briefly interrupted by the electrical hum of a flickering light. “You look like you don’t believe me,” added Seokyu with a grin when he had seen both Doyoung and Yuta attempt to form a sentence, only to be betrayed by their own mouths. “Luckily, no one tends to. That’s why I’m here and not locked up with the other guys. What would a tiny kid like me be doing trapped in a group like that, right?”

Doyoung shook his head. “No, we believe you. We just don’t understand why you’re helping us when you had an escape.”

“Because it’s not really an escape,” shrugged Seokyu. “I can’t go home to China because I can’t afford a plane ticket on this salary. Anyway, I’d be a bad example to my brother if he found out what I’d been doing. You don’t escape this kind of thing, it will always find you again.”

“You had a way out,” reiterated Yuta; his tone of voice was enough to tell the younger boy that he was irritated, even if nothing about his calm demeanour showed it. “You need to take that, whilst you still can. You’re a kid.”

“I’m nineteen. I know what I’m doing, I decided to do this by myself. By helping other people, maybe I can cancel out all the shit I did do.”

Seokyu almost mumbled his final words, head dropping to watch has his hands twisted at his apron. “I don’t have to help you,” he suggested, speaking as if you would to a wild animal you did not want to provoke. “If you don’t want me to, then it’s fine and I…”

“No,” interrupted Doyoung, softly. “We want you to. We’re just worried about you. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

“I don’t care. I want to do this.”

Seokyu smiled when Doyoung smiled, two slight grins in an exchange of agreement. Yuta watched with a cool glare but did not argue, accepting the outcome of the conversation. “Next week, then,” continued Doyoung. “If you can do it. We don’t want to burden you or anything, but if you can then we’ll send someone at the same time as now.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” reassured Seokyu, pushing the bag of groceries over to the two boys who took it without hesitation. “I’ll be here every night, until I earn enough for that plane ticket to China.”

It was completely dark by the time Doyoung and Yuta were back outside, with the moon managing to cast dancing shadows when blocked by the tall skyscrapers of Seoul city. “He’s too naïve,” warned Yuta, once the convenience store boy was out of ear shot and only Doyoung could hear his words. “He’s going to get killed.”

“He knows the risks just as well as the rest of us,” shrugged Doyoung. “If anything, he knows them better. I knew about a group who worked with Japan and they were fucked up. Sooman would have seemed like a guardian angel in comparison.”

“He’s seen some shit, so what?” murmured Yuta. “We all have.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a voice behind them.

“Yuta, could I have a word?”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to put a trigger warning here but I also don't want a spoiler so, just be aware that it might not be a great idea to read this if you have issues with this sort of subject matter, and please stop reading if you feel uncomfortable <3

The voice was almost as chilling as the night air, Yuta turning immediately at the cold tone of Lee Sooman as the older man waited for him under the dim glow of a street lamp. Doyoung also stopped beside him when he heard it, turning and holding onto the arm of the Japanese boy who had been addressed.

“I…” stuttered Yuta at first, before composing himself. “What did you want?”

Sooman stepped forward. “Doyoung can take the food home. Yuta will be back later. I have a mission for him, alone. It’s his role in the group that I require tonight, not yours.”

Yuta pulled away from Doyoung before he could protest, the only sign that Doyoung needed to tell him that he needed to follow Sooman’s instructions, and that everything would be okay. With the slightest hesitation, Doyoung turned his back on them and moved as fast as he dared back in the direction towards their apartment. “You need me to kill someone, don’t you?” asked Yuta, once Doyoung was out of earshot. “That’s all you ever use me for.”

“Now, Yuta,” argued Sooman, pursing his lips at Yuta’s tone. “You’re reckless and impulsive but you’re still good at what you do, which is why I keep you around. There is a car in the side road behind me. We are going to get in it. We are going to drive, and we are going to talk. Then, when we get to our destination, you will take the gun that I have prepared for you and you will shoot the person we have captured through the head without protesting. Do you understand?”

Yuta scowled. “Did someone else piss you off?” he taunted, before dropping his head and biting his lip until he was able to muster a meek sound. “I understand.”

“No protesting?”

“No protesting.”

The car itself was filled with leather, and the suffocating scent of aftershave that Yuta detested. He had ridden in Sooman’s cars a handful of times, all for unpleasant situations, and the experience of spending an extended time next to someone who could end your life with a single glance was not one that Yuta wanted to repeat often. “I’m not going to kill you, Yuta,” confirmed Sooman, as if he could sense the Japanese boy’s fear. “Like I said earlier, I detest you, but I admire you. I’m not going to kill you whilst you’re still useful to me.”

“Why can’t you get someone else to kill this person?”

Yuta’s question hung in the air, quickly becoming overshadowed by the noise of an engine whilst Sooman considered an answer. “We’re losing people like you,” he answered. “I’d rather not get my hands dirty. EXO themselves are still recovering from a nasty – shall we say, accident? Red Velvet and SNSD are far better at espionage compared to front line violence, and SHINee and TVXQ aren’t currently available. It is not your position to question my decisions, Yuta. Anyway, I believe you’ll enjoy this one.”

“How can I enjoy killing someone?”

“Revenge is sweet, Yuta. I thought you would have savoured the opportunity to take the life of the man who had killed Ji Hansol.”

Yuta stopped breathing for just a minute, not long enough for Sooman to notice but enough to create a pounding in Yuta’s head. Hansol had pinned his own death on a police officer who had come to investigate the scene of their heist from that night, with Hansol himself deliberately firing his own gun to create the gunshot that would be considered responsible for his death. Yuta had returned to Sooman with the name of the innocent policeman, who would now have to die by his hand. He would have savoured the chance to take the man who had killed Hansol, if Hansol had actually been killed.

The man had just been doing his job, and now he had to die. Yuta was only doing his job in killing him.

“If you open the hatch that is beneath your feet,” instructed Sooman, watching as Yuta became pliable to his instruction, moulding himself to the shape of a killer when he was given no other option. “You will find a gun with a single shot. This is the gun you are going to use. I trust that you will not need more than one shot.”

“I prefer working with a knife,” mumbled Yuta, and Sooman responded with an unsettling laugh that did not seem to reach a point of happiness, instead mocking him.

“Why?” he asked. “You prefer being up close and personal to the people you kill, I assume? You like to be directly responsible for their death, to feel their blood dripping down your skin and staining your hands. I knew you’d get a taste for it eventually, if I bought you here. Everyone does, sooner or later. You enjoy being a monster, Yuta?”

Yuta nodded; it was a lie. He preferred working with a knife because there was no way he could miss with a blade in his own hands. A gun had to be aimed, whereas a knife was instinctively accurate. The sensation of blood dripping down his hands, staining his clothing, was just an unfortunate side effect.

“It’s begun to rain,” murmured Sooman, turning to the window to watch the sparse raindrops tracing paths down the thick glass. “It will make the clean-up easier, but it’s also quite fitting, don’t you think? I believe they call it ‘pathetic fallacy’.”

He nodded, but Yuta had not heard the words before. He was letting the majority of what Lee Sooman was saying wash over him as he bent down, unclipping the lid of the hatch that was disguised in the floor. There was a single pistol – one shot, if Yuta guessed correctly – that seemed as if it could hold no power but could end a life in a second. He had used one before. He had not liked it.

“We’re here,” announced Sooman, placing a hand on Yuta’s back and gently pulling on his jacket to force him back into a sitting position. “You found the weapon, yes? It’s got one shot, but I trust you not to miss.”

“You’ll be holding him down?” asked Yuta, turning his assumption into a question.

“Yes,” confirmed Sooman. “Not me personally, but I have people who help me in these situations. We found the man hiding in an apartment a few miles away from here, and I thought you’d like the opportunity to kill him so we’ve been taking special care to give you that. You might even enjoy this one, even if I do say so myself. Now, you have to promise me that we’ll be done as soon as you can. I don’t have time to wait around, Yuta.”

“I’ll be quick.”

Sooman’s smile was haunting, a grin that did not reach anywhere on his face but his lips as they curled upwards. He climbed out of his own side of the car with a certain grace, leaving Yuta to open his own door and let his feet splash down into a puddle on the dark tarmac beneath the vehicle on his own. The gun in his hand made his movements more precise as he was careful to not press the trigger by accident.

The dark night combined with rain made it difficult to see, but as he slammed the door close behind him, Yuta could make out the figure of Sooman crossing into the shadowy depths of an alleyway. Two men already waited, holding a third on his knees with a bag placed over his face and tied at his neck to prevent him from pulling it off. It was an unnecessary precation; his hands were bound behind his back with a cable tie.

“Remember our agreement, Yuta,” called Sooman, his voice echoing against the concrete surfaces that surrounded him. There were no streetlights here, only the moon and the hum of passing traffic. Yuta watched the bound man tense at the sound of his name. “You promise you’d manage this in one shot. Let’s get this over with.”

With a nod from their leader, the two men guarding the prisoner went to pull the bag away from his head to give Yuta a clear shot and the opportunity to see exactly who’s skull his bullet would pierce. Prepared to be finished as quickly as he had arrived, Yuta readied his gun and aimed with his finger on the trigger before the bag was even thrown to the floor. As soon as the face was revealed to give him a target, he was prepared to shoot.

Hansol.

The dirty blonde hair was familiar before he even lifted his head; as soon as he knew, Yuta could see the older boy in every inch of the figure from his posture to the familiar tank top to the way tears trailed across his cheeks and mixed with freshly fallen raindrops. When he did lift his head, having the courage to smile softly at Yuta even in that situation, there was no doubt.

Shaking, Yuta lowered his gun and fixed his eyes on the hunched boy kneeling in a growing puddle. He was tempted to turn the weapon on Sooman, but before Yuta could comprehend the decision to turn the barrel of the pistol to another, the two bodyguards had instantly pointed their guns at him. “Remember our promise now, Yuta,” announced Sooman, the grin audible in his cold tone. “You promised this would be quick. If you even think of turning that gun on me, you’ll be dead before I am.”

The older man walked forward, watching as Yuta’s eyes trailed his every move up until the point he stood behind Hansol. When he reached out with his foot and kicked Hansol face down to the floor, Yuta tore his gaze away. “This is the man that killed Ji Hansol, is it not?” continued Sooman. “Did you not even think that meeting up beneath the apartment block that I have under surveillance and all times was a smart idea? I was told that Ji Hansol was killed in a mission and then here he is, meeting up on secret dates with his boyfriend who also should not be leaving his apartment, and you think I wouldn’t notice?”

“It’s not his fault,” argued Yuta, through gritted teeth in a voice that became more of a growl. He raised his gun again, but kept it pointed just to the left of his enemy to keep his own life intact. “I convinced him. He came to check on me.”

“He shouldn’t even have been alive for you to keep contacting. If you don’t kill him, we’ll kill you. I thought I could trust you, Yuta, but now you are becoming a danger and you know exactly what I do to people like you. We have plenty of replacements. It would not be difficult to just…erase you.”

As the conversation continued around him, Hansol used what strength he had left to pull himself back to his knees, trying to hide any shivering from the weather in case it was mistaken for fear. Yuta was joining him in tears now, the familiar glistening droplets carving paths down his face. Hansol could feel his heart break at the younger boy’s sadness.

“Yuyu,” he tried, voice hoarse and broken from the fight he had put up at his own room. Sooman nudged him again as he spoke, but Yuta hung onto the sound of his voice immediately. “Yuyu, don’t be a hero for me.”

This time, Yuta dropped his gun. He let it fall from his hands, clattering to the floor as he glanced up at Sooman for some confirmation that he could move. At the slightest nod, Yuta rushed forward and fell to his knees right in front of the older boy, taking his cheeks in his hands. Hansol’s face was beginning to bruise from his own fight earlier. “Hyung,” murmered Yuta, but Hansol closed his eyes.

“Don’t,” he protested, resting his forehead against Yuta’s. “Don’t be sad, please. Don’t try and fight back. They’ll kill you and then they’ll kill me anyway and I don’t want to take you with me like that.”

Yuta copied the older boy, closing his eyes and focusing on the warmth of his soft breathing. “You don’t deserve this.”

“I’ve been dead for a while now. I think I can handle it.”

Hansol’s laugh was cold, broken, and unlike anything Yuta had ever heard from him before. “Please don’t say that,” he tried, but Hansol pulled away and hung his head.

“Just do it,” he ordered. “You deserve better than me. I’m not worth dying for.”

“I don’t want anyone but you.”

Yuta watched as Hansol’s body was wracked by a sigh, trying to hide tears to stop the younger from feeling anymore guilt than was already running through his veins. “Then do it for me,” he suggested, his words hiding behind the distant lullaby of city traffic; only Yuta could hear him. “You deserve so much more than this, I know you do. It’ll get better someday, and you need to stay alive until that happens so that I know you’re happy. That’s all I want from you. You don’t need me around for you to live the rest of your life.”

“I can’t do it.”

Hansol nodded his head. “You can,” he argued. “I know you can, Yuyu. I want you to do this.”

When Hansol leant forward this time, his lips met with Yuta’s in a shallow kiss that was tainted by the salt from tears running down both their cheeks. He broke away almost immediately. “I forgive you. For everything. You always used to ask me if you were a good person and I always told you that you were and I need you to know that, I need you to believe it for me. Tell me, please.”

Shaking his head, Yuta could not hold back a sob any more but he bit his lip and let Hansol’s words fall on his own tongue. “I’m a good person,” he repeated, with each syllable tasting bitter. “I’m a good person?”

“Yes,” answered Hansol, softly. “We’re running out of time. You – you won’t be afraid to remember me, will you? Like the others?”

Yuta bit down on his lip hard enough to draw blood; he nodded. “I’ll never forget you.”

With a nudge from Hansol as a reminder to clamber back to his feet, Yuta felt numb with each movement as he took the slow footsteps to reclaim the gun that lay forgotten on the floor. It felt wrong in his hand, the metal burning his skin as he shakily lifted it to his original aim. It was far more difficult through the blurred vision of tear-stained eyes.

“Yuyu,” murmured Hansol, keeping his eyes tightly closed so that he did not have to look at the gun which was now pointed at his head. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

The words stuck in Yuta’s throat, but he managed to choke them out through a sob as he hung his own head towards the floor. As he hesitated, a bodyguard stepped forward and held the barrel of his gun directly against Yuta’s head. The metal was cold; it burnt.

He did not have a choice.

When his gun fired, the shot was loud enough to drown out a rumble of thunder that crept its way across Seoul. The rain got heavier as Hansol’s body fell to the floor, directly into a pool of water that began to soak into the material of his tank top, blood leaking from a wound in his head. Yuta fell with him, his trembling knees giving way and throwing him to the concreate in a heap of tears as the gun fell from his hands.

“Someone will be coming to clean this mess up,” ordered Sooman; he waved his two guards in the direction of his car. “I recommend you don’t stay long. I assume you have your phone on you, so call one of the others to give you a lift home. You’re on house arrest again, Nakamoto. I don’t want to see your face again until you prove to me that you’re not going to be a traitor. If I do, we’ll throw you in the same grave as your boyfriend.”

Yuta was left alone without even realising; Hansol’s corpse offered no company, even as he crawled closer and desperately clawed at his hand, his face, his chest, anywhere that the body of the boy he loved still held warmth. Hansol’s eyes were closed; if it had not been for the blood running through his hair, he could almost have been sleeping.

The rain was relentless. When Yuta calmed his breathing just enough to scramble for the phone in his pocket, the rain pelted onto the screen and made pressing any numbers difficult. He phoned the first number he found: Sicheng.

“Hello?”

Sicheng’s voice was sweet. Yuta could hear he was smiling. In contrast, Yuta begged through sobs, managed to summon words through thick tears that hid their true meaning. “Sich…Sicheng, can – can, can you put…Taeyong-hyung, please?”

“What’s wrong?”

There is was – the switch from cute to concern as Sicheng heard Yuta’s sadness, recognised the sound of tears that Yuta never slipped into unless there was something very, very wrong. “Taeyong,” was all Yuta replied, his own chest burning with gulp after gulp of damp, cold air.

“Yuta? Sicheng said you were upset?”

Taeyong’s voice was level, calm – he knew how to take charge, even at the sound of his own team mate, friend, falling down a hole to a point that no one had ever seen him in before. “Hansol,” gasped Yuta; Taeyong murmured something unintelligible. “Hansol’s….shot, someone shot him…”

“Hansol’s been dead for a while now, Yuta. Remember?”

“No – lied, he lied. Ran. Sooman found him and he’s – he’s…hyung, please come.”

“Yuta? Where are you?”

Yuta rested his head forward, burying his face in the fabric of Hansol’s shirt. “I don’t know.”

 

It was possible to find Yuta’s location through the signal of his phone; the alleyway where Yuta was hidden was not far from the safehouse, but a distance that was enough to keep any record of what had happened that night silent from the boys who lived there. Taeyong moved first, making out the figure of a broken Yuta still clutching at the final signs of life in the body of his former friend, even lover.

Sicheng gasped when he saw, the noise inaudible but enough to cause worry. He had never heard Yuta cry before, the moment over the phone being a heart-stopping moment, and this moment now being enough to instantly justify any difficulty Yuta had been having in communicating his situation. Kun had come as a precaution, a slim chance that someone might have been alive, but one look at Hansol’s body was enough to tell him that there was nothing he could do. He was the first to kneel beside Yuta, to take the jacket from his own back and rest it over the shoulders of the sobbing, trembling boy who still desperately clung to his one lifeline.

Jaehyun, there as a driver, was the first to put the scene together. He took in the gun that lay forgotten on the floor, the shadows on Yuta’s face and the trembling of his hands, the words from over the phone – “Sooman found him.”

“It’s a punishment,” muttered Jaehyun, edging closer to Taeyong to let their leader know why Yuta was still there, why he had not just gotten up and left like every other murder he had committed. “Yuta said Sooman found Hansol, and this – this is how he punished him, because Yuta was part of that too.”

“He made Yuta kill him?” confirmed Taeyong. He could not cry; he was meant to be the strongest.

“I think so.”

“Fucking barbaric.”

With no position that could stop him from breaking, Sicheng tried to hide the tear that ran down his cheek by wiping it away on his sleeve. He chewed at his nails, adding a quiet “we need to get him home” hidden behind his hand. Taeyong nodded, biting down on his lip hard enough to draw blood which he quickly swiped away with his tongue. He joined Kun beside the younger boy, placing an arm around Yuta’s shoulders in the same way as the jacket, pulling him closer. Yuta clung to his leader rather than the dead body.

“We have to go,” murmured Taeyong, letting Yuta hide his face in the crook of his neck. It was almost as if there were no tears anymore, just body-wracking breathing that forced its way through the thin boy. Yuta had never been in this state before. “You’ll catch cold like this, you’ll get ill. You’re still healing from a gunshot wound, Yuta. It’s dangerous.”

“I’m a monster.”

Taeyong only just caught the words. “No,” he reassured. “You’re not. You never will be.”

He pulled Yuta tighter into a hug when the Japanese boy continued to sob. “We’ll get you home,” he tried, running a hand through the other boy’s hair. “We’ll make some food, yeah? With the ingredients that Doyoung brought back? And then Kun can check you over, and you can get some sleep, and then in the morning it’ll be better.”

When Taeyong tried to stand up, Yuta stayed on the floor.

“He’s not coming back, is he?”

 

At the apartment, the atmosphere was enough to act as a warning to those who did not know what was going on that asking questions would only make everything worse. Yuta still trembled as Taeyong sat him down on the sofa, wrapping Kun’s jacket around him even tighter and making sure that there were no injuries to the Japanese boy beyond the bruises on his knees. They had warned Doyoung in advance, and the scent of something finally cooking on the stove that was not ramen was flooding the small room.

There were no more tears, and Yuta had stopped sobbing, but there was a glazed look in his eyes that reminded everyone of something they had seen often – a corpse.

“Here,” reassured Kun, taking the seat beside the shaken boy and edging closer to him. “Are you injured too? Need me to do anything?”

Yuta shook his head at first, but then he stopped and instead took hold of Kun’s arm before he moved away. “Yes,” he answered. “My phone.”

“Isn’t it in your pocket?”

“No, my – my other phone. It’s in the bathroom, under the third floorboard from the left. I…I used to talk to Hansol on it. That’s how we were talking.”

Jungwoo hid his face. Yuta’s tone was a reminder, a moment a night ago of “if you tell anyone, you’re dead” before Yuta himself snuck away through the front door of the apartment and only came back nearly an hour later. He did not speak of it; Jungwoo kept his promises.

Kun found the phone with ease, only handing it over to Yuta when the Japanese boy pre-empted his hesitation by snatching it from him. “It’s Hansol’s phone, isn’t it?” he asked, knowing the answer, once it was taken from his possession,

Yuta nodded. “Was,” he corrected. “When he left, he – he gave it to me. We could talk. We had to.”

He had unlocked the phone with hope, although there was an underlying certainty that he was not going to find anything waiting for him. At the sight of a notification, it was enough to almost reignite a flame of wishes that would lead back to Hansol somewhere still being alive. It was a voice-mail – sent before he died, but still a chance to hear his voice. He was not yet gone.

Yuta locked the phone again.

 

He could not sleep. He was not expecting too. Even with the meal, the reassurance of the others that he would be okay, even his own voice convincing everyone that he was fine, that he had overreacted, he knew sleep would not come. Johnny had been left awake on guard and had offered to talk to him, to distract him, but Yuta had turned down any offer given and said that he just needed the bathroom.

Yuta always hid in the bathroom. Before, it had been where he had knelt to text Hansol every single night he could, just to make sure that the boy was still alive, well, hidden somewhere that he could not be found. Even now, he still found himself clutching the phone that had once been his lifeline to the boy he loved.

The voicemail message was still there. Yuta wanted to listen to it, but the strength to open it was difficult to muster. It would be the last thing he ever heard in Hansol’s voice and he did not want that commitment but at the same time, he wanted the comfort of Hansol’s existence that he now lacked. There was no longer going to be hastily texted messages that served as conversations, or nightly exchanges of “I love you” and “Be safe” when Yuta needed just someone he could trust and talk to.

If Yuta lacked that, he needed something else.

With a sigh, he opened the notification and clutched the phone to his ear. A woman, computer generated, informed him that he had one unread message, that had been sent only a handful of hours before Hansol himself had died, that had clearly been recorded in a rush because Yuta could hear the catch of Hansol’s breath and the sound of movement in the background.

_“Yuyu! Please, don’t be worried, okay? I don’t know when you’ll get this. I hoped you’d answer but…I – never mind, it’s okay. I think I was seen when I came to see you, is all. It’s not your fault, please don’t blame yourself. I…I should have been more careful about it, but someone followed me home and now – I’m probably overreacting, it could be anyone, but it’s just annoying me, you know? So, I’m going to move. I’m going to go back to Busan, I don’t think they’ll find me there. I know I told you that my sister knew but I – Yuyu, I’m sorry. That was a lie. I couldn’t put her through that in case I died again, right? I – I shouldn’t laugh, but it’s funny. I’ll go back to Busan and find somewhere to hide. If – If it is someone, and I do get caught, I know we talked about this. I don’t want you to think I’m abandoning you which is why I’m calling, I wanted to hear your voice but I guess…you’ll just have to settle for hearing mine, anyway. I wanted to tell you that you’re not a monster for what Sooman makes you do, okay? You seemed like you felt guilty the other night when we met, like you did when we were together before I, you know, died. When you first started killing people, you were always like that. I don’t want to ever see you like that again. You’re a good person who’s just put in bad situations. I trust you, don’t worry. Anyway, I have to go. I’ll talk to you soon, yeah? I love you, Yuta!”_

The voicemail ended with a click.


End file.
